THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


ON  CONTEMPORARY 
LITERATURE 

BY 

STUART  P.  SHERMAN 


'  Man  must  begin,  know  this,  where  nature  ends," 

MATTHEW  ARNOLD. 


COPYRIGHT,  1917, 

BT 

HENRY  HOLT  AND  COMPANY 


First  printing,  November,  1917 
Second  printing,  May,  1918 
Third  printing,  Jane,  1922 
Fourth  printing,  January,  1923 


TNI   QUIRK    *    tODM    OO.  Pitt* 

IUHWAT,    N.  J. 


College 
Library 

PR 


TO 
PAUL  ELMER  MORE 


FOR  permission  to  reprint  the  essays  in  this  volume, 
I  am  indebted  to  the  Editor  of  The  Nation.  Since 
their  original  appearance  they  have  been  revised  and  in 
several  instances  greatly  enlarged. 

I  have  been  accused  of  being  a  besotted  "  Victorian  " 
— a  kind  of  creature  which  ought  to  be  extinct,  very 
obnoxious  to  the  younger  critics,  yet  still  so  numerous 
as  to  constitute  a  not  negligible  element  in  the  proces- 
sion of  our  days.  To  give  a  certain  color  to  the  charge 
I  have  included  an  essay  on  Alfred  Austin,  whom  I 
regard  as  the  most  amusing  of  the  Victorian  poets. 

Mr.  Henry  Holt  asks  me  to  allay,  if  possible,  the 
resentment  of  those  who  may  inquire  why  Shakespeare 
has  been  smuggled,  like  a  Joseph's  cup,  into  the  corn 
of  a  volume  on  contemporary  literature.  Shakespeare 
is  here  because  I  find  him  the  most  interesting  and  sug- 
gestive of  living  writers.  His  presence  helps  one  to 
distinguish  the  values  of  his  competitors.  His  humanism 
serves  as  a  measure  of  the  degrees  of  their  naturalism. 
Reflective  readers  will  perceive,  I  hope,  that  the  object, 
if  not  the  ostensible  subject,  of  the  essay  on  Shakespeare 
is  also  the  object  of  the  essays  on  Mr.  Wells,  for 
example,  and  Mr.  Dreiser  and  Mr.  George  Moore. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  PAGE 

INTRODUCTION           3 

I    THE  DEMOCRACY  OP  MARK  TWAIN          ....  18 

II    THE  UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  H.  G.  WELLS        .       .  50 

III  THE  BARBARIC  NATURALISM  OF  THEODORE  DREISER     .  85 

IV  THE  REALISM  op  ARNOLD  BENNETT        ....  102 
V    THE  AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  GEORGE  MOORE  .       .  120 

VI    THE  SKEPTICISM  OF  ANATOLE  FRANCE    ....  169 

VII    THE  EXOTICISM  OF  JOHN  STNGE 190 

VIII    THE  COMPLACENT  TORYISM  OF  ALFRED  AUSTIN     .       .  211 

IX    THE  AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  HENRY  JAMES  .       .       .  226 

X    THE  HUMANISM  OF  GEORGE  MEREDITH    ....  256 

XI    SHAKESPEARE,  OUR  CONTEMPORARY 285 

INDEX  307 


ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 


INTRODUCTION 

THERE  was  perhaps  a  time  when  the  literary  critic 
was  expected  to  tell  the  public  the  truth  about  books 
and  authors.  Current  philosophy  bids  us  relinquish 
that  vain  expectation.  The  critic  may  indicate  the 
position  of  an  author,  and  he  may,  if  he  chooses,  com- 
pare that  position  with  his  own.  But  as  for  truth,  it  is 
a  personal  and  private  matter  not  to  be  measured  by 
any  common  standard.  Candid  novelists  like  Mr.  H.  G. 
Wells  admit  that  they  make  their  "  truth  "  as  they  need 
it.  Courageous  philosophers  like  Professor  Dewey 
boldly  proclaim  that  they  abandon  their  "  goodness  " 
when  it  stands  in  the  way  of  those  who  manipulate 
events.  The  modern  sage  in  danger  of  martyrdom  swiftly 
cuts  loose  from  the  forlorn  hope  and  reattaches  his 
conscience  to  a  "  going  concern."  "  For  what  is  truth, 
after  all,"  asks  the  relativist,  "  but  some  definite  per- 
son's impression  at  some  definite  point  of  view?  Name 
the  person  and  indicate  the  point  of  view,  and  I  shall 
know  how  to  value  his  truth."  "  And  what  is  goodness," 
asks  the  cheerful  pragmatist,  "  but  the  thing  that 
goes  ?  " — in  an  autocracy,  presumably,  the  will  of  the 
autocrat,  in  a  democracy  the  vote  of  the  majority.  The 
notion  that  one  person  is  better  qualified  than  another 
to  fix  values  in  literature  has  recently  been  designated 
by  one  of  literature's  professors  as  the  favorite  and  most 

3 


4    ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

persistent  fallacy  of  criticism.  "  Holding  the  critic's 
opinions  to  be  obligatory  upon  other  readers,"  says  one 
of  Professor  Dewey's  followers  in  an  interestingly  anar- 
chical treatise  on  "  The  Social  Criticism  of  Literature," 
"  is  very  like  c  fiat  money  ' — easy  to  issue  but  sometimes 
harder  to  realize  upon.  No  power  on  earth  can  make  a 
book  really  valuable  to  me  if  it  is  not  so." 

I  admit  the  force  of  the  relativist  argument — with  a 
certain  reservation.  Though  contemporary  history 
may  appear  to  be  overwhelmingly  against  me,  I  cannot 
bring  myself  absolutely  to  abandon  the  ancient  notion 
of  human  progress.  Sages  whom  I  revere  assure  me  that 
we  do  not  advance,  that  we  merely  pass  through  recur- 
rent cycles  of  change.  I  cling  fondly  to  the  hope  that 
they  are  mistaken.  Iconoclasts  declare  that  the  critic's 
"  childish  estimate  of  The  Swiss  Family  Robinson  prob- 
ably differs  widely  from  his  grown-up  verdict  upon  it. 
But  his  second  judgment  is  not  necessarily  a  truer  judg- 
ment than  the  first,  nor  the  first  than  the  second."  If 
we  must  relinquish  the  general  presumption  that  the 
judgment  of  maturity  is  better — that  is  to  say,  truer — 
than  the  judgment  of  childhood,  we  should  hasten,  in 
the  interest  of  democratic  fair  play,  to  extend  the  politi- 
cal, as  we  have  already  extended  the  educational, 
franchise  to  the  kindergarten.  We  may  come  to  that 
point ;  but  common  sense  is  not  yet  ready  for  the  abdi- 
cation involved  in  our  reaching  it.  Common  sense  still 
clings  to  the  antique  notions  of  growth  toward  power, 
ripening  toward  wisdom,  progress  toward  truth.  The 
moment  that  one  admits  the  reality  of  progress,  one  has 
immediately  to  admit  the  reality  of  the  object  toward 


INTRODUCTION  5 

which  progress  is  made;  and  the  way  is  open  for  the 
establishment  of  standards  and  measures  for  marking 
the  advances  in  our  course  and  also  those  aberrations 
arid  retrogressions  which  occasionally  justify  the  "  mar- 
tyrs "  in  standing  fast  against  the  main  movement  of 
their  time. 

A  critic  who  deals  with  his  contemporaries  should  not, 
however,  show  himself  utterly  out  of  sympathy  with  the 
spirit  of  his  age.  In  the  essays  here  assembled,  I  hope 
it  will  be  found  that  I  have  exhibited  a  certain  respect 
for  the  "  relativity  of  knowledge."  Yet  what  is  sauce 
for  the  critic  is  sauce  for  the  criticized.  If  the  critic 
can  give  us  no  absolute  truth,  neither  can  the  creative 
artist.  I  feel  this  so  strongly  that  in  examining  the 
work  of  poet  or  novelist  it  appears  to  me  above  all 
interesting  and  important  to  go  behind  the  work  and  to 
discover  the  workman  and  his  point  of  view.  He  gives 
me  a  "  criticism  of  life  "  seductively  and  imposingly 
disguised  as  a  representation  of  life,  designed  to  capti- 
vate my  emotions  and  intelligence,  and  in  some  degree 
to  alter  my  conception  of  truth.  It  is  thoroughly  perti- 
nent to  the  business  of  criticism  to  inquire  searchingly 
what  manner  of  man  is  offering  his  eyes  for  mine.  When 
an  author  hands  me  a  book  entitled  "  The  Way  of  All 
Flesh  "  or  "  The  Way  of  the  World  "  my  sympathies 
with  the  relativist  are  roused  at  once ;  the  first  leap  of 
my  curiosity  is  to  know  how  much  of  the  world,  what 
aspects  of  the  flesh,  can  be  seen  on  the  level  and  at  the 
point  of  observation  where  the  author  habitually  takes 
his  stand. 

.The  reader  of  many  books  discovers  that  at  a  certain 


6    ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

level  and  at  a  certain  point  of  view  all  the  observers  are 
impressed  with  the  infamous  nature  of  man ;  on  another 
level  and  at  another  point  of  view  all  the  observers  sing 
the  praises  of  our  aspiring  humanity;  at  still  another 
level  and  at  a  third  point  of  view  all  the  observers  are 
smitten  with  the  glory  of  God.  Naming  these  levels  and 
these  points  of  view  is  an  elementary  step  toward  more 
difficult  sub-classifications.  Now  and  then  one  meets  a 
man  who  violently  objects  to  being  placed  and  classified. 
He  takes  pride  in  saying  "  I  am  not  an  *  ist '  nor  an 
*  ite  '  and  I  subscribe  to  no  *  ism.' '  In  all  probability 
he  is  not  an  author;  for  the  beginning  of  effective 
authorship  is  usually  the  adoption  or  the  acceptance  of 
a  definite  point  of  view.  It  may  be  that  he  is  an  author 
with  shifting  and  inconsistent  points  of  view — Gold- 
smith, for  example,  of  whom  Johnson  exclaimed :  "  Sir, 
he  knows  nothing ;  he  has  made  up  his  mind  about  noth- 
ing." It  may  be  that  he  is,  like  Montaigne,  a  man  who 
has  made  up  his  mind  not  to  make  up  his  mind :  in  which 
case  he  has  subscribed  to  the  most  catholic  of  all 
"  isms  " — skepticism.  In  general  we  may  predict  that 
the  man  who  imagines  himself  sui  generis  will  discover 
some  day,  after  the  fashion  of  M.  Jourdain,  that  he  has 
been  an  "  ist  "  all  his  life  without  knowing  it.  May  the 
classifications  in  this  book  help  him  toward  that  useful 
bit  of  self-knowledge.  Knowing  one's  class  is  knowing 
one's  "  place  in  the  world,"  and  knowing  one's  place  in 
the  world  is  knowing  one's  relative  value.  To  assist 
authors  and  readers  in  the  process  of  self-recognition 
and  self-appreciation  is  one  of  the  pleasures  of  criticism. 
Some  years  ago  an  English  writer,  impressed  by  the 


INTRODUCTION  7 

relativity  of  our  knowledge  and  by  the  vast  power  of 
imposition  lodged  in  the  hands  of  the  literary  critic,  pro- 
posed a  means  to  prevent  the  guileless  public  from  think- 
ing more  reverently  of  critical  "  authority "  than  it 
ought  to  think.  He  urged  all  honest  practitioners  to 
preface  each  of  their  articles  with  a  brief  confession  of 
faith  in  some  such  fashion  as  this :  "  I  am  a  member  of 
the  Church  of  England  (or  an  Atheist,  Dissenter, 
or  what  not)  ;  a  Conservative  (or  a  Liberal,  Radical,  or 
what  not)  ;  a  Classicist  (or  a  Romanticist,  Realist,  or 
what  not)  ;  belong  to  the  Spectator  set  (or  the  Saturday 
Review,  or  the  Daily  Mail,  or  what  not).  This  sensi- 
tively honorable  proposal,  it  will  be  remembered,  was 
anticipated  in  its  essential  feature  by  the  device  of 
Bottom — "  Tell  them  that  I,  Pyramus,  am  not  Pyramus, 
but  Bottom  the  weaver :  this  will  put  them  out  of  fear." 
Superfluous  Bottom's  device  may  have  been;  it  was 
inspired  by  a  tender  humanity  worthy  of  all  emulation. 
It  is  in  his  spirit  that  I  write  this  "  prologue  "  to  indi- 
cate the  point  of  view  from  which  I  have  been  studying 
the  tendencies  in  contemporary  literature. 

I  write  this  "  prologue  "  under  the  impression — no 
doubt  temporary,  yet  for  the  moment  almost  overwhelm- 
ing— that  we  are  living  to-day  in  the  worst  of  all  pos- 
sible worlds.  It  is,  at  any  rate,  a  world  of  which  every 
intelligent  man  must  feel  ashamed.  It  is  an  absurd 
world.  By  the  more  or  less  immutable  nature  of  things 
it  is  so  constituted  that  the  path  of  life  for  the  ordinary 
man  in  the  ordinary  course  of  events  is  beset  from  the 
cradle  to  the  grave  with  pitfalls  of  mental  and  physical 
pain.  On  this  precarious  pathway  men  with  but  a  trifle 


8    ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

less  than  the  average  sureness  of  footing  and  indulgence 
of  fortune  are  so  constantly  in  misery  that  pain  appears 
to  them  the  one  steadfast  reality.  Revising  the  Greek 
poet  quoted  by  Saint  Paul,  they  are  ready  to  say :  "  In 
pain  I  live  and  move  and  have  my  being."  Philosophers 
even  in  the  halcyon  days  of  peace  have  opined  that  forti- 
tude is  the  supreme  virtue  and  freedom  from  pain  the 
supreme  felicity  of  our  decaying  nature.  For  in  this 
world  of  birth  pangs  and  death  pangs,  insensate  and 
involuntary  forces  of  nature  are  in  unintermitting  con- 
spiracy against  the  happiness  of  man.  Yet  he,  at  the 
present  moment,  with  the  utmost  deliberateness,  with 
all  the  energy  of  his  will,  with  all  the  resources  of  his 
intellect  is  seeking,  in  all  quarters  of  the  globe,  to  mul- 
tiply pain  beyond  all  recorded  precedent — pain  to  the 
body  and  pain  to  the  heart — disease,  dismemberment, 
and  death,  to  body,  mind,  and  spirit.  For  the  moment 
I  speak  not  of  the  ulterior  purposes  of  the  men  who,  in 
Professor  Dewey's  admirable  phrase,  "  manipulate 
events."  The  ulterior  purposes  of  those  who  triumph 
will  undoubtedly  have  to  be  pronounced  benign  and  beau- 
tiful. But  I  speak  now  of  man's  immediate  acts  and 
facts,  his  means  and  not  his  ends ;  and  those  are  of  an 
absurdity  beyond  tragedy — colossal,  stupefying.  So 
that  the  present  stage  of  human  "  progress  "  calls  to 
remembrance  the  regions  which  Dante  visited,  places 
"  mute  of  all  light,"  where  souls  blaspheming  the  Divine 
Power  are  whirled  in  an  infernal  hurricane,  or  writhe  in 
fire,  or  sunk  to  the  lips  in  ice  devour  one  another. 

No  man,  Socrates  assures  us,  knowingly  chooses  what 
is  not  for  his  own  good.     Then  what  "  sweet  thoughts, 


INTRODUCTION  9 

what  longing "  have  led  men  to  this  doloroso  passo? 
Carlyle  described  the  French  Revolution  as  "  truth 
dancing  in  hell-fire."  To  my  vision,  at  least,  the  truth 
that  dances  in  the  hell-fire  of  the  war  of  the  German 
Invasions — in  which  we  live,  move,  and  have  our  being — 
is  the  old  truth  declared  by  the  grim  seer  of  Florence: 

Intesi  che  a  cosi  fatto  tormento 
enno  dannati  i  peccator'  carnali, 
che  la  ragion  sommettono  al  talento. — 

"  I  learnt  that  to  such  torment  are  doomed  the  carnal 
sinners  who  subject  reason  to  lust.  .  .  .  '  The  first 
of  these  concerning  whom  thou  seekest  to  know,'  he  then 
replied,  *  was  Empress  of  many  tongues.  With  the  vice 
of  luxury  she  was  so  broken,  that  she  made  lust  and  law 
alike  in  her  decree,  to  take  away  the  blame  she  had 
incurred.'  " 

This  last  phrase,  "  that  she  made  lust  and  law  alike 
in  her  decree,  to  take  away  the  blame  she  had  incurred," 
sums  up  for  me  a  deep,  many-branched  ruinous  tendency 
of  contemporary  thought.  This  is  the  logical  conclusion 
of  the  naturalistic  philosophy  which  has  been  for  many 
years  subtly  extending  its  influence  in  all  countries  and 
in  every  field  of  human  activity.  It  is  the  logical  con- 
clusion of  repudiating  all  standards,  teaching  one's 
conscience  to  trot  in  the  rut  of  events,  and  making  one's 
truth  as  one  needs  it.  The  primitive  savage  is  taught  to 
believe  that  his  happiness  depends  upon  the  observance 
of  tabus.  The  modern  savage  is  taught  by  a  thousand 
sophists  to  believe  that  tabus  are  the  only  obstacles 
between  him  and  his  happiness.  He  "  blasphemes  the 


10       ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

divine  power  "  by  identifying  its  dictates  with  his  appe- 
tites, so  that  no  check  of  religious  superstition  or  of 
reasoned  reverence  remains  in  his  consciousness  to 
oppose  the  indefinite  expansion  of  his  "  self-love."  The 
devil,  as  Goethe  represents  him,  is  the  spirit  that 
denies.  Mr.  Paul  Elmer  More,  certainly  one  of  the 
most  penetrating  moralists  of  our  times,  says  that 
this  is  clean  kam.  The  spirit  that  denies,  he  de- 
clares, is  God.  I  do  not  recall  any  single  utterance 
from  living  lips  that  has  impressed  me  as  more  pro- 
foundly illuminating.  I  should  not  like  to  think  that 
denial  is  the  only  aspect  of  God,  but  I  am  sure  that  it 
is  the  aspect  of  God  most  ignored  by  those  who  flatter 
themselves  that  because  they  have  forgotten  him  he  has 
forgotten  them.  And  I  am  as  certain  as  I  can  be  of 
anything  that  God  is  a  spirit  who  denies  the  validity 
of  adopting  the  laws  of  the  physical  universe  for  the 
moral  regiment  of  man. 

The  great  revolutionary  task  of  nineteenth-century 
thinkers,  to  speak  it  briefly,  was  to  put  man  into  nature. 
The  great  task  of  twentieth-century  thinkers  is  to  get 
him  out  again — somehow  to  break  the  spell  of  those 
magically  seductive  cries,  "  Follow  Nature,"  "  Trust 
your  instincts,"  "  Back  to  Nature."  We  have  trusted 
our  instincts  long  enough  to  sound  the  depths  of  their 
treacherousness.  We  have  followed  nature  to  the  last 
ditch  and  ditch  water.  In  these  days  when  the  educator, 
returning  from  observation  of  the  dog  kennel  with  a 
treatise  on  animal  behavior,  thinks  he  has  a  real  clue  to 
the  education  of  children;  when  the  criminologist  with 
a  handful  of  cranial  measurements  imagines  that  he  has 


INTRODUCTION  11 

solved  the  problem  of  evil ;  when  the  clergyman  discovers 
the  ethics  of  the  spirit  by  meditating  on  the  phagocytes 
in  the  blood;  when  the  novelist  returning  from  the 
zoological  gardens  wishes  to  revise  the  relations  of  the 
sexes  sd  as  to  satisfy  the  average  man's  natural  craving 
for  three  wives ;  when  the  statesman  after  due  reflection 
on  "  the  survival  of  the  fittest  "  feels  justified  in  devour- 
ing his  neighbors — in  the  presence  of  all  these  appeals 
to  nature,  we  may  wisely  welcome  any  indication  of  a 
counter-revolution. 

Literary  criticism  has  been  an  accomplice  in  the  usur- 
pations of  the  naturalistic  philosophy.  Disillusioned, 
it  should  be  an  ally  in  the  revolt  against  it.  There  are 
signs  of  insurrection  in  many  quarters.  For  the  valor 
and  high  spirits  of  his  revolt  one  welcomes  the  critical 
writings  of  Mr.  G.  K.  Chesterton.  Fighting  with  intel- 
lectual mountebanks,  he  has  stolen  some  of  their 
weapons ;  he  has  taken  his  stand  in  what  his  adversaries 
will  assail  as  a  "  mediaeval "  citadel ;  yet  in  his  Ortho- 
doxy, despite  its  archaic  elements,  he  has  produced  the 
most  brilliantly  sensible  book  that  has  come  in  recent 
years  from  the  embattled  journalists  of  London.  In 
France  assailants  of  naturalism  ordinarily  wear  the 
antique  armor  of  the  Catholic  faith,  and  appeal  to  tra- 
ditions which  are  of  comparatively  little  potency  in 
English-speaking  lands.  Professor  Guerard,  a  French- 
man, writing  in  this  country  on  French  thought  in  the 
nineteenth  century,  attacks  the  same  foe  without  a 
return  to  Rome,  and  on  grounds  open  to  the  young 
people  who  modestly  call  themselves  the  "  intelligentsia." 
I  have  found  much  anti-naturalistic  virtue  in  a  little 


12   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

book  by  Sigurd  Ibsen,  the  son  of  the  dramatist,  which 
was  translated  into  English  in  1913  with  the  title, 
Human  Quintessence — persuasive  by  reason  of  its  large 
concessions  to  the  enemy  and  the  author's  unwillingness 
to  take  refuge  in  a  metaphysical  or  theological  thicket. 
Professor  Shorey  has  just  made  a  spirited  sally  against 
the  naturalistic  educators  in  The  Assault  on  Humanism. 
Mr.  W.  C.  Brownell,  whose  criticism  is  invariably  distin- 
guished by  its  high  and  fine  civility,  has  in  his  recently 
published  Standards  discharged  among  the  Barbarians 
a  quiverful  of  arrowy  and  exquisitely  pointed  satire. 
But  Mr.  Paul  Elmer  More  and  Professor  Babbitt,  in 
more  or  less  obvious  cooperation,  are,  I  think,  the  critics 
in  America  who  have  most  consistently  striven  to  make 
the  movement  against  naturalism  conscious  of  itself  and 
aggressive  and  formidable.  They  have  defined  its  ob- 
jects, illustrated  its  principles,  contrived  its  strategy, 
and  richly  provided  it  with  munitions  of  war — Professor 
Babbitt  in  The  New  Laocoon  and  elsewhere,  Mr.  More 
in  the  impressive  series  of  his  Shelburne  Essays. 

There  are  at  least  three  ways  of  discrediting  the 
current  naturalism  or  "  scientific  monism."  The  most 
difficult,  perhaps,  is  to  attack  it  upon  purely  metaphysi- 
cal grounds.  The  most  unanswerable  is  to  oppose  it 
with  religious  intuitions.  The  simplest  and  possibly  not 
the  least  effective  is  to  meet  it  with  Johnsonian  com- 
mon sense,  appealing  to  the  general  reason  and  experi- 
ence of  mankind  against  the  conclusions  of  the  ratiocina- 
tive  faculty  of  the  individual.  In  America  the  critical 
movement  which  opposes  naturalism  is  not,  if  I  under- 
stand it,  distinctively  religious  but  distinctively  human- 


INTRODUCTION  13 

istic.  It  seeks  not  primarily  to  reclaim  man  for  God 
but  to  reclaim  him  for  civil  society;  not  so  much  to  fit 
him  with  wings  as  to  persuade  him  to  shed  the  horns  and 
hoofs  which  he  has  been  wearing  in  his  long  apres-midi 
d'un  faune.  The  humanist  therefore  requires  no  com- 
plex philosophical  apparatus.  He  may  keep  the  peace 
with  scientific  monism  as  a  theory  of  great  logical  co- 
gency, and  yet  assert  that  the  really  consistent  monist 
is  "  a  phenomenon  we  have  never  seen  and  never  shall 
see."  In  effect  he  dismisses  the  theory  as  irrelevant  to 
human  needs  and,  indeed,  contradictory  to  human  ex- 
perience. Though  he  shun  the  metaphysical  abyss  and 
profess  his  inability  to  climb  the  steeps  of  mystical 
insight,  he  is  at  one  with  the  saints  in  his  clear  perception 
of  the  eternal  conflict  between  "  the  law  for  things  " 
and  "  the  law  for  man."  This  is  the  rock  upon  which 
the  humanist  builds  his  house. 

In  the  natural  world  he  discerns  no  genuine  law  of 
progress,  no  conservation  of  values,  no  unity  of  purpose, 
but  brutal  cross  purposes,  blind  chance,  and  everlasting 
change.  The  notion  that  the  Darwinian  "  survival  of 
the  fittest "  indicates  an  aristocratic  tendency  in 
nature,  he  deems  a  vulgar  error  based  upon  a  confusion 
of  adaptation  to  environment  with  conformity  to  ideal 
ends.  In  human  society,  on  the  other  hand,  Mr.  Ibsen, 
for  example,  detects  an  "  impetus,"  unique  in  character, 
which  "  urges  us  to  bring  our  existences  and  the  condi- 
tions about  us  into  agreement  with  an  ideal  picture  we 
bear  in  our  hearts."  In  the  human  consciousness  Mr. 
More  detects  an  "  inner  check  "  which,  in  the  interest  of 
character,  opposes  the  push  of  instinct,  the  expansive 


14   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

impulse  of  the  elan  vital.  "  All  the  experience  of  the 
past,"  says  Professor  Babbitt,  "  cries,  as  though  with  a 
thousand  tongues,  through  the  manifold  creeds  and  sys- 
tems in  which  it  has  been  very  imperfectly  formulated, 
that  the  highest  human  law  is  the  law  of  concentration." 
To  call  this  unique  "  impetus,"  this  "  inner  check,"  this 
"  law  of  concentration  "  human  or  to  call  it  divine — is 
not  this  in  the  present  state  of  our  ideas  a  tolerably 
insignificant  matter  of  nomenclature?  Certainly  the 
matter  of  quintessential  importance  is  to  recognize  this 
impulse  and  to  exalt  it.  For  it  cleaves  the  universe  in 
twain  as  decisively  as  the  fiat  that  divided  the  waters 
which  were  under  the  firmament  from  the  waters  which 
were  above  the  firmament. 

The  line  of  progress  for  human  society  must  therefore 
be  in  the  direction  of  this  human  impetus.  It  cannot 
possibly  lead  "  back  to  nature,"  but  must  steadily  show 
a  wider  divergence  from  the  path  of  natural  evolution. 
Society  is  in  great  part  an  organized  opposition  to 
nature,  and  it  justifies  itself  only  when  it  maintains  its 
ground.  It  is  irrelevant  to  approve  or  condemn  this  or 
that  possible  line  of  conduct  on  the  basis  that  it  is  or  is 
not  in  conformity  with  nature.  It  is  pertinent  only  to 
inquire  whether  it  is  in  harmony  with  the  constitution 
and  aim  of  the  human  organization.  It  is  not  accord- 
ing to  the  tendency  of  clay  to  become  a  pot  or  of  wood 
to  become  a  table,  but  it  is  of  the  very  essence  of  the 
artisan  and  the  artist  to  overcome  the  tendency  of  wood 
and  clay.  It  is  according  to  the  nature  of  an  animal  to 
preserve  its  own  life  and  to  reproduce  its  species,  but  it 
is  of  the  essence  of  a  man  to  lay  down  his  life  out  of 


INTRODUCTION  15 

reverence  for  his  great-grandfather  and  to  check  the 
impulse  to  indiscriminate  reproduction  out  of  considera- 
tion for  his  great-grandson.  The  impulse  to  refrain 
thus  indicated  we  can  find  nowhere  in  nature.  It  is  part 
of  the  pattern  or  design  of  human  society  that  lies  in 
the  heart  of  man. 

The  application,  then,  of  biological  terminology  to 
human  institutions — now  common  among  German  and 
other  political  philosophers — is  fraught  with  confusion 
and  illegitimate  inferences.  Society  is  not,  after  all,  an 
organism  but  an  "  organization."  It  is  not  determined 
wholly,  like  organisms,  by  environment  and  previously 
existing  forms  of  society,  but  partly  by  a  vision  of  forms 
that  have  never  existed  and  by  a  passion  for  approxi- 
mating them.  It  is  not  unfolded  naturally  and  spon- 
taneously, but  artificially  and  by  contrivance.  Its  laws 
are  not  statements  of  observed  relationships  among 
forces;  they  are  the  forces  themselves — the  shaping, 
creative  energy  of  the  special  human  impetus,  stemming 
the  tide  of  natural  impulse,  and  saying,  "  Here  and  there 
thou  shalt  go,  and  no  farther."  Yet  we  speak  of  the 
evolution  of  society  and  the  evolution  of  animals  as  if 
polar  bears  and  political  constitutions  ran  on  all  fours, 
had  begun  to  trouble  the  womb  of  chaos  at  much  the  same 
epoch,  and  had  been  delivered  to  a  passively  expectant 
world  by  a  similar  spasm  of  vital  energy.  Hypnotized 
by  the  passes  of  a  facile  monism,  the  consciousness  of 
man  sees  itself  playing  but  a  cognitive  and  spectatorial 
part  in  history,  accepts  the  universe  as  it  would  accept 
an  avalanche,  and  lies  down  in  a  deep  paralysis  of  the 
will  to  await  what  the  morrow  may  bring  forth. 


16   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

To  the  humanist  not  the  least  interesting  consequence 
of  the  present  war  will  be  its  effect  upon  the  philosophy 
of  naturalism  and  its  expression  in  literature;  for  the 
conflict  presents  itself  to  his  eyes  as  essentially  a 
struggle  between  the  masters  of  the  "  law  for  things  " 
and  the  servants  of  the  "  law  for  man."  When  in  the 
summer  of  1914  the  German  army  went  roaring  and 
singing  and  destroying  over  the  borders  of  Belgium  into 
France,  sweeping  all  the  painfully  constructed  works  of 
man  before  it,  it  struck  the  imagination,  in  spite  of  its 
mechanical  organization,  like  a  river  in  flood,  seeking 
the  sea,  like  a  ruthless  natural  force,  following  nature's 
laws;  and  so  its  own  apologists  have  described  it. 
When  Belgium  checked  it,  when  France  and  England 
dammed  it,  when  one  ally  after  another  hemmed  it  in, 
the  counterstroke  was  quite  uniformly  described  in  terms 
equivalent  to  far-off  Asiatic  Siam's  declaration  of  war 
(which  comes  as  I  write)  as  an  effort  to  "  uphold  the 
sanctity  of  international  rights  against  nations  showing 
a  contempt  for  the  principles  of  humanity."  Here  for 
German  and  other  naturalistic  thinkers  is  the  grand  dis- 
illusion. Here  for  the  humanist  is  the  hope  amid  the 
horror.  Humanity  does  after  all  recognize  certain 
rights  and  principles  as  fixed  and  established;  in  hours 
of  ease  speaks  of  them  like  a  wanton;  but  when  need 
arises,  dies  for  them  as  for  the  possession  that  is  dearer 
than  life.  The  victory  of  the  Allies  should  logically  be 
reflected  in  a  literature  exalting  the  vindicated  "  law  for 
man."  Haunted  by  memories  of  the  fiery  ruin  wrought 
by  those  who  made  lust  and  law  alike  in  their  decree,  it 
^should  not  seek  in  nature  for  the  order,  stability,  justice, 


INTRODUCTION  17 

gentleness,  and  wisdom  that  only  man  has  ever  desired 
or  sought  to  create.  It  should  mirror  a  society  more 
regardful  of  its  ascertained  values,  more  reverent  of  its 
fine  traditions,  more  reluctant  to  take  up  with  the 
notions  of  windy  innovators.  It  should,  in  short,  sug- 
gest in  its  own  subtle  way  the  desirability  of  continuing 
to  work  out  in  the  world  that  ideal  pattern  which  lies 
in  the  instructed  and  disciplined  heart. 


I 

THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN 

ANY  one  who  has  thought  of  Mark  Twain  merely  as 
the  author  of  many  books  may  well  be  recommended  to 
make  his  acquaintance  as  a  puissant  American  person- 
ality through  the  three  thick  volumes  of  Mr.  Paine's 
biography.  As  an  inducement  to  that  considerable 
undertaking  I  record  here  the  experience  of  a  reader 
who  approached  the  enterprise  with  a  distinct  apprehen- 
sion that  he  would  be  overtaken  by  fatigue  before  he 
emerged  from  the  two-hundred-and-ninety-sixth  chapter 
and  plunged  into  the  twenty-four  appendices.  He  was 
thinking  of  Mark  Twain  as  a  humorous  writer ;  and  his 
mind  was  still  irritated  by  memories  of  the  extravagant 
admirers  who  in  recent  years  have  saluted  the  veteran 
of  a  thousand  ovations  as  a  superlative  artist,  a  pro- 
found moralist,  and  a  grave  philosopher.  He  reflected 
on  the  fact  that  the  biographer  was  something  of  an 
idolater  and  that  his  biography  was  the  fruit  of  six 
years'  labor,  during  four  of  which  the  subject  had 
offered  himself  for  study,  and  had  dictated  volumes  of 
recollections.  He  suspected  that  these  1,719  pages 
would  constitute  a  last  disproportionate  monument 
under  which  the  old  humorist  would  be  buried.  Then 
he  opened  the  book  and  began  to  read. 

When  he  left  off  reading,  two  or  three  days  later,  he 

18 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      19 

found  it  difficult  to  escape  from  the  interesting  illusion 
that  he  himself  was  Mark  Twain.  He  felt  as  if  he  had 
just  returned  from  a  prolonged  exploration  of  the 
world,  and  were  rounding  out  in  tranquillity  a  restless 
life  that  had  extended  over  three-quarters  of  a  century. 
He  looked  back  over  a  stream  of  experience  of  historical 
breadth  and  national  significance.  He  had  been  carried 
back  to  the  days  of  Andrew  Jackson,  and,  with  the  hope 
and  hunger  of  the  westward  migration,  had  drifted  as 
the  slave-holding  John  Clemens  out  of  Kentucky  into 
Tennessee  and  on  to  Missouri,  and  there  had  died, 
dreaming  in  poverty  of  his  75,000  acres  of  Tennessee 
land  unsalable  at  twenty-five  cents  an  acre.  In  1835  he 
had  been  born  again  in  the  son,  Samuel  Langhorne 
Clemens.  Half-educated,  mischievous,  and  clever  he 
had  set  type  for  a  struggling  little  journal  in  Hannibal, 
Missouri,  ten  years  before  the  Civil  War,  and  had  made 
his  first  "  sensation  "  by  printing  in  his  brother's  paper 
a  poem  very  faintly  reminiscent  of  Robert  Burns,  in- 
scribed "To  Mary  in  H— 1"  (Hannibal).  He  had 
taken  one  end  of  a  Testament,  his  mother  holding  the 
other,  and  had  promised  not  to  "  throw  a  card  or  drink 
a  drop  of  liquor,"  and  had  set  out  to  see  the  world,  still 
as  a  printer,  in  St.  Louis,  New  York,  Philadelphia, 
Keokuk,  and  Cincinnati.  But  then  he  heard  the  call  of 
the  Father  of  Waters,  and  for  four  years  was  pilot, 
and  studied  the  intricate  mysteries  of  the  Mississippi, 
and  laughed  and  jested  with  rivermen  from  St.  Louis 
to  New  Orleans,  till  a  shell  from  the  Union  batteries 
exploded  in  front  of  his  pilot-house  and  ended  that 
chapter.  Then  for  a  few  days  as  second  lieutenant  of 


20   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

an  extemporized  militia  company,  he  rode  a  small  yellow 
mule  to  the  aid  of  the  Confederacy.  Next  the  golden 
flare  in  the  far  West  caught  his  eye,  and  couched  among 
the  mail-bags  behind  six  galloping  horses,  he  swapped 
yarns  across  seventeen  hundred  miles  of  plains  till  he 
reached  Carson  City,  and  became  a  miner,  and  suffered 
the  quotidian  fever  of  the  prospector,  and  filled  his 
trunk  with  "  wild-cat "  stock,  and  knew  the  fierce 
life  of  frontier  saloons  and  gambling  hells.  From  the 
unremunerative  pick  and  shovel  he  turned  to  the  bois- 
terous, bowie-knife  journalism  of  the  Enterprise,  and 
thence  to  vitriolic  humor  on  the  Morning  Call  in  San 
Francisco,  and  he  sent  his  name  to  the  Atlantic  coast 
with  The  Jumping  Frog  of  Calaveras  County,  and 
lined  his  pockets  with  gold  by  a  great  news  "  scoop  "  in 
the  Sandwich  Islands. 

It  was  1866,  he  was  thirty-one  years  old,  and  his 
"  career  "  had  just  begun.  He  now  entered  a  forty- 
year  engagement  as  a  public  lecturer,  and  competed 
successfully  with  Fanny  Kemble  and  P.  T.  Barnum, 
and  made  himself  known  to  hundreds  of  thousands  whom 
he  convulsed  with  laughter.  At  the  same  time  he  became 
a  great  traveler,  perlustrated  the  cities  of  his  native 
land,  plundered  the  vineyards  of  Greece,  presented  an 
address  to  the  Czar,  visited  Jerusalem  with  the  Inno- 
cents, sojourned  in  England  and  gossiped  with  the 
Prince  of  Wales,  in  Germany  and  dined  with  the 
Emperor,  in  India  and  was  entertained  by  a  native 
prince  in  Bombay,  interceded  with  President  Kruger 
for  the  prisoners  of  the  Jameson  Raid,  captured  the 
cities  of  Australia  and  New  Zealand,  and  exacted  trib- 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      £1 

ute  from  the  whole  world.  Three  or  four  years  after 
the  Civil  War  he  had  begun  to  throw  off  books  as  a 
comet  throws  off  meteors.  Then  he  took  up  the  burdens 
of  a  publisher,  bargained  with  General  Grant  for  his 
memoirs,  and  sold  a  quarter  of  a  million  copies  where 
the  other  bidder  had  planned  for  a  sale  of  five  or  ten 
thousand.  His  imagination  took  fire  at  a  dream  of 
magnificent  wealth,  and  he  became  a  great  speculator, 
and  in  one  year  invested  $100,000  in  projects,  and 
sank  a  fortune  in  an  unperfected  type-setting  machine, 
and  went  into  bankruptcy.  Then,  at  the  age  of  sixty 
he  girded  himself  anew  and  made  another  fortune  in 
three  years  and  repaid  his  creditors  to  the  last  dollar, 
and  in  a  few  years  more  had  accumulated  a  third  for- 
tune for  himself,  and  drew  annual  royalties  equal  to  the 
salary  of  the  President  of  the  United  States,  and  built 
himself  splendid  mansions,  and  rested  from  his  labors 
on  an  Italian  mahogany  bed,  clad  in  a  dressing-gown  of 
Persian  silk.  Then  the  University  of  Oxford  summoned 
the  printer,  pilot,  miner,  reporter,  traveler,  lecturer, 
author,  publisher,  capitalist  across  the  sea,  and  robed 
him  in  scarlet,  and  made  him  a  Doctor  of  Letters,  and 
he  retired  into  unofficial  public  life  till,  in  1910,  the  call 
came  to  set  his  course  toward  the  sinking  sun. 

This  is  not  the  biography  of  an  author ;  it  is  a  part  of 
the  prose  Odyssey  of  the  American  people;  and  it  will 
continue  to  be  read  when  many  of  Mark  Twain's  writ- 
ings are  forgotten.  It  will  continue  to  be  read  because 
it  conveys  in  relatively  brief  compass  the  total  effect 
which  he  spent  his  lifetime  in  producing — with  American 
recklessness  and  prodigality,  with  floods  of  garrulous 


22   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

improvisation.  Mr.  Paine  loiters  a  little,  it  is  true, 
through  the  years  of  Mark  Twain's  final  prosperity, 
but  that  was  the  period  of  his  personal  relations  with 
his  hero,  and  we  must  forgive  him  if,  like  an  artist 
infatuated  with  his  subject,  he  paints  us  several  por- 
traits differing  only  slightly  in  attitude  and  shading. 
His  first  two  volumes  are  really  marvels  of  compression ; 
he  disposes,  for  example,  of  the  trip  to  Palestine  in 
twenty-odd  pages,  and  of  the  voyage  around  the  world 
in  less ;  yet  very  likely  he  tells  about  as  much  of  those 
famous  expeditions  as  after  the  lapse  of  a  hundred  years 
a  more  sophisticated  posterity  will  stay  to  hear.  From 
first  to  last  he  rejects  tempting  opportunities  to  digress 
into  history  and  overflow  into  description;  he  supplies 
only  so  much  setting  as  serves  to  bring  the  actor  into 
higher  relief.  He  is  under  an  illusion,  I  believe,  as  to 
the  value  of  Mark  Twain's  theology  and  philosophy  and 
literature ;  but  his  sense  of  what  we  may  call  biographi- 
cal value  is  admirable.  His  book  is  full  of  animated  and 
characteristic  phrase,  gesture,  and  attitude.  He  has 
extenuated  nothing  of  his  hero's  weakness  or  his 
strength,  and  has  set  forth  with  all  possible  veracity 
the  processes  through  which  the  man  of  the  frontier 
became,  without  losing  his  essence  and  his  tang,  quite 
literally  the  man  of  the  world. 

No  one  recognized  more  frankly  than  Mark  Twain 
himself  that  in  a  sense  he  was  a  raider  from  the  Border. 
He  never  pretended  to  be  the  thing  that  he  was  not,  and, 
on  the  other  hand,  he  was  never  ashamed  of  the  thing 
that  he  was.  He  planted  himself,  according  to  the 
Emersonian  injunction,  squarely  upon  his  instincts, 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      23 

accepted  "  the  society  of  his  contemporaries,  the  connec- 
tion of  events,"  and,  with  a  happy  faculty  for  turning 
everything  to  account,  capitalized  his  very  limitations. 
It  was  one  of  the  secrets  of  his  immense  personal  effect 
that  he  never  felt  nor  looked  like  a  scholar  or  a  thought- 
worn  literary  person,  but  rather  like  a  man  of  affairs — 
erect,  handsome,  healthy,  debonair — in  his  earlier  years 
like  a  prosperous  ranchman,  later  like  a  financier,  a 
retired  field-marshal,  an  ambassador,  or,  as  his  friends 
would  have  it,  like  a  king.  It  was  an  iron  constitution, 
tempered  in  the  Mississippi  and  tested  in  the  mining 
camps  of  the  West,  that  enabled  him  to  endure  the  stu- 
pendous fatigues  of  his  great  lecturing  tours,  to  throw 
off  100,000  words  of  a  novel  in  six  weeks,  to  toil — with- 
out exercise  and  smoking  heavily — all  day  and  half  the 
night,  and,  when  he  was  past  seventy,  to  talk  copyright 
for  hours  with  a  hundred  and  fifty  different  Congress- 
men and  radiate  superfluous  energy  at  a  dinner  in  the 
evening,  or  to  play  billiards  with  his  biographer  till 
four  o'clock  in  the  morning. 

If  a  kind  of  unconscious  frontier  impudence  per- 
suaded him  of  his  competency  as  a  Biblical  critic,  and 
carried  him  into  the  realm  of  abstract  ethics,  and  led 
him  late  in  life  to  add  the  weight  of  his  authority  to  the 
followers  of  Delia  Bacon,  it  was  a  kindred  and  valuable 
mental  innocence  that  made  the  first  fifty  years  of  his 
life  a  perpetual  voyage  of  discovery,  sharpened  his 
observation  and  his  appetite  for  experience,  and  pre- 
served the  vernacular  vigor  of  his  speech.  Had  he 
undergone  in  his  formative  period  the  discipline  of  an 
older  and  firmly  stratified  society,  he  would  have  been 


24   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

saved  from  some  lapses  in  taste,  but  he  would  have 
lacked  that  splendid  self-confidence  which  is  born  of 
living  among  a  relatively  homogeneous  folk,  and  which 
in  the  long  run  explained  his  unrivaled  power,  on  the 
platform  and  in  print,  of  getting  in  touch  with  his 
public.  As  pilot,  miner,  and  Nevada  journalist  he 
found  his  most  profitable  associates  among  men  rather 
than  among  women,  and  formed  the  habit  of  address- 
ing himself  to  a  robust  masculine  audience — a  habit 
which  gives  him  an  almost  unique  distinction  in  Amer- 
ican literature,  and  marks  him  clearly  as  belonging 
to  the  heroic  age.  He  was  "  a  man's  man."  It  is  a  sig- 
nificant fact  that  he  was  introduced  to  his  future  wife 
by  her  brother,  who  had  become  a  great  friend  of  his  on 
the  voyage  of  the  Innocents.  It  is  an  equally  significant 
fact  that  the  friendship  terminated  and  the  brother 
departed  on  a  journey  when  he  learned  that  the  humorist 
intended  to  marry  his  sister.  If  Mark  Twain  ever  be- 
came a  lion  among  the  ladies,  it  was  because  they  liked 
lions,  not  because  he  made  any  special  concessions  to 
the  ladies.  He  detested  vFane  Austen,  her  works,  and 
her  world;  and  unabashed  he  accounted  for  his  antip- 
athy :  "  When  I  take  up  one  of  Jane  Austen's  books, 
such  as  Pride  and  Prejudice,  I  feel  like  a  barkeeper 
entering  the  kingdom  of  heaven."  What  he  thought  of 
the  "  kingdom  of  heaven  "  he  has  set  forth  in  another 
place. 

No  American  writer  has  ever  enjoyed  a  more  purely 
democratic  reputation  than  Mark  Twain.  From  village 
celebrity  to  international  renown,  he  has  been  advanced 
stage  after  stage  by  popular  suffrage.  The  plain,  un- 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      25 

bookish  citizen  holding  both  his  sides  at  a  public  lecture 
has  helped  roar  him  into  eminence.  The  freckled,  brown- 
legged  pirate  who  finds  Tom  Sawyer  nearer  to  his  busi- 
ness and  his  bosom  than  Robinson  Crusoe  has  played  no 
negligible  part  in  the  campaign.  The  vote  of  the  retired 
merchant  reading  A  Tramp  Abroad  in  preparation  for 
a  European  holiday  told  decisively  in  his  favor  before 
the  tardy  voice  of  the  professional  critic  assented.  Only 
when  an  overwhelming  majority  of  his  fellow  country- 
men had  established  his  position,  did  the  universities 
formally  recognize  the  fact.  And  one  suspects  that  for 
him  as  he  strolled  into  the  Sheldonian  Theatre  clad  in 
scarlet  to  receive  his  degree  from  Oxford  the  pleasantest 
note  of  the  occasion  was  the  "  very  satisfactory  hurrah  " 
from  the  audience. 

In  the  last  few  years  of  his  life  he  received  a  higher 
honor  than  a  degree  from  any  university  however  vener- 
able; he  received  the  highest  honor  within  the  gift  of 
the  Republic.  Let  us  distinguish  here,  not  his  three 
"  manners  "  but  the  three  aspects  of  his  reputation. 
Like  a  political  orator  making  his  maiden  speech  or 
invading  hostile  territory,  Mark  Twain  had  broken  the 
reserve  of  his  first  audience  with  a  string  of  irresistible 
"  funny  stories  "  and  a  comic  recital  of  his  travels. 
Handicapped  by  uproarious  laughter,  he  produced  a 
number  of  books  which  demanded  serious  consideration, 
but  his  leonine  head  had  grown  gray  before  he  lived 
down  his  reputation  as  a  "  platform  humorist."  At 
about  the  time  of  his  seventieth  birthday,  however,  he 
obtained  a  reconsideration  of  his  case,  and  the  gravest 
tribunals  decided  that  he  indubitably  belonged  in  the 


26   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

history  of  literature,  if,  indeed,  he  was  not  the  "  fore- 
most American  man  of  letters."  After  that,  national 
feeling  about  him  crystallized  rapidly  into  its  final 
state.  He  appeared  in  white  flannels  in  midwinter, 
declaring  that  white  was  the  only  wear  for  a  man  with 
seventy  clean  years  behind  him;  we  were  significantly 
pleased.  When  our  newspapers  had  made  one  of  their 
occasional  "  little  breaks  "  in  reporting  the  result  of  his 
serious  illness,  he  cabled  from  the  Bermudas  that  the 
reports  of  his  death  were  "  greatly  exaggerated."  It 
was  a  phrase  that  we  all  envied,  from  our  Presidential 
phrase-maker  down ;  we  recognized  that  he  was  no  longer 
a  mere  literary  man — he  was  a  national  character. 
When  he  died  we  abandoned  the  last  reservation.  We 
said  with  one  voice:  He  was  an  American. 

To  the  foreign  critic  this  ultimate  tribute  may  seem 
perplexingly  cheap  and  anticlimactic.  That  is,  of 
course,  due  to  the  mistaken  notion  that  we  number  some 
five  score  millions  of  Americans.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
we  number  our  Americans  on  our  ten  fingers;  the  rest 
of  us  are  merely  citizens  of  the  United  States.  Any 
one  who  will  take  the  trouble  to  be  born  may  become 
a  citizen.  To  become  an  American  requires  other 
talents.  We  are  more  than  doubtful  about  the  status 
of  Washington:  he  was  the  Father  of  his  Country, 
but  he  lacked  a  certain  indispensable  tang.  Lowell — 
forgetting  Franklin,  who  had  the  tang — said  that  Lin- 
coln was  the  first  American.  From  certain  indications 
it  looks  as  if  Mr.  Roosevelt  might  turn  out  to  be  an 
American.  Only  the  other  day  *  he  sent  us  a  message  to 
1  Written  in  1910. 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      27 

this  effect :  "  I  know  that  the  American  people  will  agree 
that  I  could  have  acted  in  no  other  way  than  I  did  act." 
The  American  is  a  man  of  destiny.  His  word  and  deed 
flow  inevitably  out  of  the  American  character.  On  the 
one  hand,  he  does  a  thing  because  it  is  right;  on  the  other 
hand,  the  thing  is  right  because  he  does  it.  Revising 
the  thought  of  Henry  V  we7  may  say,  Nice  customs 
curtsy  to  great  Americans. 

This  point  is  strikingly  illustrated  by  a  story  which 
Mark  Twain  tells  on  himself  in  one  of  the  chapters  of 
his  autobiography.  It  was  in  1877,  before  a  company 
including  all  the  leading  "  geniuses  "  of  New  England, 
banqueting  in  honor  of  Whittier's  birthday.  When 
Mark  Twain's  turn  came,  he  rose  and  entered  upon  a 
fictitious  "  reminiscence."  Out  in  southern  California 
he  had  knocked  at  a  miner's  cabin,  and  announced  him- 
self as  a  literary  man.  The  miner  replied  with  marked 
ill-humor  that  he  had  just  got  rid  of  three  of  them, 
"  Mr.  Longfellow,  Mr.  Emerson,  Mr.  Oliver  Wendell 
Holmes — consound  the  lot.  .  .  .  Mr.  Emerson  was  a 
seedy  little  bit  of  a  chap,  red  headed ;  Mr.  Holmes  was 
as  fat  as  a  balloon;  he  weighed  as  much  as  three  hun- 
dred, and  had  double  chins  all  the  way  down  to  his 
stomach.  Mr.  Longfellow  was  built  like  a  prizefighter. 
.  .  .  They  had  been  drinking,  I  could  see  that."  And 
so  on. 

At  the  words  "  consound  the  lot,"  Twain  had  expected 
a  peal  of  laughter,  but  to  his  amazement  "  the  expres- 
sion of  interest  in  the  faces  turned  to  a  sort  of  black 
frost."  The  whole  story  was  a  dismal  failure;  it  was 
years  before  the  author  recovered  from  the  shame  of  it. 


28   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

Speaking  for  the  moment  as  a  pious  reader  of  O.  W. 
Holmes,  James  Russell  Lowell,  and  The  Atlantic 
Monthly,  I  am  not  in  the  least  surprised  at  the  New 
England  frost.  And  I  know  very  well  that  Jane  Austen 
or  Thackeray  or  George  Meredith  would  have  agreed 
with  the  New  England  geniuses  that  Mark  Twain's 
reminiscence  was  a  piece  of  crude,  heavy,  intellectual 
horse-play — an  impudent  affront  offered  to  Puritan 
aristocracy  by  a  rough-handed  plebeian  jester  from 
Missouri.  But  hear  Mark  Twain  thirty  years  after  the 
event: 

I  have  read  it  twice,  and  unless  I  am  an  idiot,  it  hasn't  a 
single  defect  in  it  from  the  first  word  to  the  last.  It  is  just 
as  good  as  can  be.  It  is  smart;  it  is  saturated  with  humor. 
There  isn't  a  suggestion  of  coarseness  or  vulgarity  in  it  any- 
where. What  could  have  been  the  matter  with  that  house? 
.  .  .  If  I  had  those  beloved  and  revered  old  literary  im- 
mortals back  here  ...  I  would  melt  them  till  they'd  run 
all  over  that  stage! 

In  his  mellow  Indian  summer  Mark  Twain  himself 
grew  conscious  that  he  had  become  an  American.  He 
knew,  therefore,  that  the  speech  was  right,  because  he 
had  made  it.  I  confess  to  a  doubt  whether  those  "  old 
literary  immortals "  would,  if  they  were  among  us, 
laugh  at  it  even  now ;  for  the  man  who  laughs  with  Mark 
Twain  must  be  capable  of  feeling  himself,  for  the 
moment,  neither  better  nor  worse  than  "  the  overwhelm- 
ing majority  "  of  his  fellow  citizens;  and  the  New  Eng- 
land "  immortals  "  were  incapable  of  feeling  themselves 
in  that  mean  position,  even  for  a  moment. 

Mr.  Paine,  like  some  other  recent  critics,  dwells  with 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      29 

a  kind  of  retaliatory  gusto  upon  the  Brahminical  reser- 
vations in  the  welcome  accorded  Mark  Twain  by  mem- 
bers of  the  older  New  England  inner  circle;  he  is  sure 
that  the  world  is  now  having  its  laugh  at  the  Brahmins. 
He  reminds  us  also  that,  while  Twain  was  still  on  a  kind 
of  nervous  probation  in  America,  he  had  been  received 
with  unrestrained  delight  in  England.  But  the  right 
explanation  of  the  hesitation  on  this  side  of  the  water 
does  not  seem  to  have  occurred  to  him.  The  fact  is  that 
Twain  was  hailed  with  jubilation  by  Englishmen  because 
he  answered  perfectly  to  their  preconceptions  of  the 
American  character  and  to  their  long-standing  demand 
for  something  "  indigenous."  They  could  enjoy  him, 
furthermore,  with  the  same  detached  curiosity  and  glee 
that  their  ancestors  at  the  Court  of  James  I  felt  in  the 
presence  of  Pocahontas — another  typical  American  who, 
as  we  read,  received  marked  attention  from  the  Queen, 
and  accompanied  her  to  the  Twelfth  Night  revels.  We 
imagine  that  some  gentlemen  in  Virginia  were  a  little 
anxious  lest  it  should  be  thought  in  England  that  all 
their  wives  were  Indians — without  deeming  it  at  all  nec- 
essary to  apologize  for  Pocahontas ;  she  was  a  lovely 
barbarian,  to  be  sure,  but  she  was  truly  representative 
only  of  the  dusky  background  of  their  civilization.  The 
Brahmins,  correctly  enough,  looked  upon  Mark  Twain, 
and  will  continue  to  look  upon  him,  as  a  robust  frontiers- 
man, produced  in  the  remote  Jacksonian  era,  carrying 
into  the  courts  of  kings  the  broad  laughter  of  the  plains, 
and  representing  an  America  that,  for  them,  is  already 
historical  and  almost  fabulous.  But  they  should  no 
more  condescend  to  this  Herculean  humorist  than  to  any 


30       ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

other  epic  hero ;  they  should  accept  him  heartily  as  they 
accept  Robin  Hood  and  Charlemagne,  the  wily  Odysseus 
and  Dick  Whittington,  thrice  Lord  Mayor  of  London. 
In  the  America  that  lies  outside  the  chilly  state  of 
mind  called  New  England,  Mark  Twain  has  rather  won 
than  lost  friends  by  the  savory  earthiness,  the  naive 
impudence,  the  lucky  undisciplined  strength  of  the  folk 
hero.  By  his  fearless  revelation  of  the  reaction  of  a 
frontiersman  in  contact  with  the  riper  aspects  of  civi- 
lization, he  has  appealed  profoundly  to  the  elements  of 
the  pioneer  that  have  lurked  in  the  hearts  of  most  of 
his  countrymen  from  the  days  of  Captain  John  Smith  to 
the  days  of  Colonel  Roosevelt.  "  Whenever  I  enjoy 
anything  in  art,"  he  wrote  to  a  friend,  "  it  means  that 
it  is  mighty  poor.  The  private  knowledge  of  this  fact 
has  saved  me  from  going  to  pieces  with  enthusiasm  in 
front  of  many  a  chromo."  To  ears  outside  of  New 
England  the  sound  of  that  is  endearingly  American.  In 
his  famous  but  somewhat  heavy-handed  attack  upon  a 
French  critic's  accounts  of  "  these  States,"  he  declared 
that  there  is  nothing  "  characteristically  American " 
except  drinking  ice  water.  But  on  the  occasion  of  a 
railway  accident  he  remarked,  "  It  is  characteristically 
American — always  trying  to  get  along  short-handed  and 
save  wages."  If  the  eulogists  of  his  humor  held  them- 
selves to  a  strict  inquisition,  they  would  find  themselves 
praising  sometimes  his  legitimate  triumphs  and  some- 
times— with  an  admiration  for  success  that  is  character- 
istically American — his  infractions  of  the  laws  of  taste. 
His  humor  not  infrequently  depends  upon  a  disregard 
of  proprieties,  and  occasionally  it  consists  of  little  but 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      31 

a  disregard  of  properties.  An  illustration  may  be  found 
in  the  one-hundred-and-twenty-third  chapter  of  the 
biography.  The  humor  on  this  occasion  consisted  in 
reminding  General  Grant  and  his  veterans  of  the  Army 
of  the  Tennessee  and  the  six  hundred  guests  at  a  great 
and  solemn  banquet  that  once  upon  a  time  their  grim 
commander-in-chief  was  wholly  occupied  in  trying  to 
get  his  great  toe  into  his  mouth — "  and  if  the  child  is 
but  the  father  of  the  man,  there  are  mighty  few  who  will 
doubt  that  he  succeeded."  The  house,  we  are  informed, 
came  down  with  a  crash,  and  General  Sherman  ex- 
claimed, "  I  don't  know  how  you  do  it !  "  That  was 
humor  befitting  the  Welsh  giants  of  the  Mabinogion  or 
rather  the  bronzed  revelers  in  Carson  City.  Only  a  very 
eminent  American,  speaking  not  in  Boston  but  in  Chi- 
cago could — in  the  characteristic  American  phrase — 
have  "  gotten  away  with  it."  It  was  a  crime  against 
taste,  colossal,  barbaric — or  it  would  have  been  in  any 
society  which  stood  upon  its  dignity,  recognized  sacred 
superiorities,  and  exacted  deferences. 

Now  the  black  frost  which  followed  Mark  Twain's 
after-dinner  speech  in  Boston,  and  the  thunder  of  ap- 
plause which  followed  his  similar  after-dinner  speech  in 
Chicago  indicate  clearly  enough,  first,  that  he  was  out  of 
place  in  Holmes's  New  England,  and,  secondly,  that  he 
was  quite  at  home  in  Walt  Whitman's  leveled  America. 
"  I  paint  myriads  of  heads,"  cried  Whitman,  "  but  I 
paint  no  head  without  its  nimbus  of  gold-colored  light." 
At  a  banqueting  table  where  every  head  is  nimbused, 
what  is  elsewhere  reprehended  as  indecorum  passes  for 
easy  democratic  familiarity.  Among  the  descendants 


32   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

of  the  high  priests  of  the  Puritans  Mark  Twain  discov- 
ered to  his  surprise  that  he  was  regarded  as  an  unsancti- 
fied  Philistine.  On  neither  of  these  occasions  was  his 
"  effrontery "  a  mere  effusion  of  individual  "  impu- 
dence." It  was  rather  an  ingenuous  assertion  of  the  new 
democratic  camaraderie — a  rough  western  interpreta- 
tion of  the  "  brotherhood  of  man,"  which  in  the  good- 
natured  Mississippi  Valley  encourages  the  "  hobo  "  in 
quest  of  a  cup  of  coffee  to  ring  the  front  door-bell  and 
accost  the  lady  of  the  house  as  "  sister,"  or  permits  the 
colored  porter  to  drop  into  a  seat  for  a  chat  with  the 
Pullman  passenger,  or  prompts  the  Reverend  "  Billy  " 
Sunday,  the  Henry  Ward  Beecher  of  that  "  section," 
to  clap  the  Almighty  on  the  back  and  to  box  the  ears 
of  the  Prince  of  Darkness.  In  Boston  Mark  Twain 
spoke  to  an  audience  which  freely  entertained  the  ab- 
stract idea  of  equality  but  which  was  by  no  means  ready 
to  accept  all  these  practical  consequences  of  the  fra- 
ternal ideal.  In  Chicago  he  spoke  to  an  audience  of 
veterans  who  in  the  Civil  War  had  felt  the  kin-making 
physical  touches  of  nature,  and  had  lost  some  of  their 
reverence  for  the  starchy  decencies  and  linen  distinctions 
of  formal  society.  In  more  or  less  conscious  rebellion 
against  the  idea  of  the  "grand  style,"  which  demands 
the  representation  of  a  military  hero  as  mounted  on  a 
splendid  charger  with  forefeet  pawing  the  air,  he 
brought  down  the  house  by  a  humorous  stroke  of  the 
new  "  realism,"  which  insists  upon  reminding  the  public 
that  even  a  military  hero  is  on  a  common  footing  with 
the  average  man  in  the  possession  and  strategic  manipu- 
lation of  his  great  toe.  The  success  of  this  effort  may 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      33 

perhaps  not  improperly  be  regarded  as  an  omen  of  the 
declining  power  of  the  New  England  tradition  in 
American  literature — the  partial  eclipse  of  Holmes  by 
Mark  Twain,  of  Longfellow  by  Whitman,  of  Hawthorne 
by  the  Hoosier  novelists,  of  Whittier  by  Edgar  Lee 
Masters.  "  Who  are  you,  indeed,"  exclaims  Whitman, 
"  who  would  talk  or  sing  in  America?  "  The  antiphonal 
voice  replies: 

I  swear  I  will  have  each  quality  of  my  race  in  myself. 
Talk  as  you  like,  he  only  suits  These  States  whose  manners 
favor  the  audacity  and  sublime  turbulence  of  The  States. 

Humor,  it  is  agreed,  consists  in  contrasts  and  incon- 
gruities, and  the  essence  of  Mark  Twain's  most  charac- 
teristic humor  consists  in  contrasting  this  typical  nim- 
bused  American,  compacted  of  golden  mediocrities, 
against  the  world — consists  in  showing  the  incongruity 
of  the  rest  of  the  world  with  this  nimbused  American. 
In  so  far  as  that  is  true,  it  necessarily  follows  that  the 
heights  and  depths  of  humor  are  beyond  the  reaches  of 
Mark  Twain's  soul.  His  laughter  is  burly,  not  fine; 
broad,  not  profound ;  and,  in  his  earlier  works,  national, 
not  universal.  When  he  that  sitteth  in  the  heavens 
laughs,  as  we  are  assured  that  he  does,  he  is  not  con- 
trasting the  year  1776  with  the  year  1300,  nor  the 
President  of  the  United  States  with  Louis  XVI,  nor  the 
uncrowned  sovereigns  of  Missouri  with  the  serfs  of 
Europe.  The  comparison  is  intolerable ;  let  us  mark  a 
lowlier  difference.  When  Puck  in  the  Midsummer 
Night's  Dream,  looks  upon  the  bewildered  Athenian 
lovers  and  exclaims,  "  Lord  what  fools  these  mortals 


34   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

be  " ;  when  Titania  waking  from  magical  sleep,  murmurs 
with  drowsy  amusement,  "  Methought  I  was  enamoured 
of  an  ass  " — the  mirth  of  these  subtle  creatures  is 
kindled  by  the  contrast  between  the  humanity  of  Bottom 
and  the  Athenians,  and  the  exquisite  manners  and  pas- 
sions of  elfland.  If  Mark  Twain  had  revised  the  play, 
he  would  have  had  some  Yankee  boy  in  overalls  making 
sport  of  Puck  and  Titania;  such,  at  any  rate,  is  the 
humor  of  A  Connecticut  Yankee  at  King  Arthur's  Court 
and  of  Captain  Stormfield's  Visit  to  Heaven.  It  is  said 
that  the  last  book  he  read  was  Carlyle's  French  Revolu- 
tion. He  must  have  found  its  picturesque  and  savage 
denunciation  of  ancient  shams  very  much  to  his  taste; 
but  his  own  work  shows  little  trace  of  its  peculiar  heart- 
searching  humor — the  humor  begotten  by  a  reflective 
comparison  of  the  upstart,  red-blooded  pageant  of 
time's  latest  hour  with  the  dim,  grim  phantasms  of 
history : 

Charlemagne  sleeps  at  Salzburg,  with  truncheon  grounded, 
only  fable  expecting  that  he  will  waken.  Charles  the 
Hammer,  Pepin  Bow-legged,  where  now  is  their  eye  of 
menace,  their  voice  of  command?  Hollo  and  his  shaggy 
Northmen  cover  not  the  Seine  with  ships,  but  have  sailed 
off  on  a  longer  voyage.  The  hair  of  Tow-head  (Tete 
d'etoupes)  now  needs  no  combing;  Iron-cutter  (Taillefer) 
cannot  cut  a  cobweb;  shrill  Fredegonda,  shrill  Brunhilda, 
have  had  out  their  hot  life-scold,  and  lie  silent,  their  hot 
life- frenzy  cooled.  .  .  .  They  are  all  gone;  sunk — down, 
down  with  the  tumult  they  made;  and  the  rolling  and 
trampling  of  ever  new  generations  passes  over  them;  and 
they  hear  it  not  any  more  forever. 

Carlyle's  humor  has  what  we  call  historical  depth; 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      35 

he  laughs  at  his  contemporaries  with  a  bygone  eternity. 
When  Whitman  asks  that  sardonic  question,  "  Whom 
have  you  slaughtered  lately,  European  headsman?" 
millions  of  strange  shadows  tend  on  him.  He,  too,  is  a 
humorist  and  a  grave  one;  he  laughs  prophetically — 
with  an  eternity  to  come.  Mark  Twain,  looking  neither 
before  nor  after,  laughs,  when  he  is  in  his  popular  vein, 
with  the  present  hour;  and  he  cannot  stand  the  com- 
parison. Not  by  his  subtlety  nor  his  depth  nor  his 
elevation  but  by  his  understanding  and  his  unflinching 
assertion  of  the  ordinary  self  of  the  ordinary  American 
— "  the  divine  average  " — did  Mark  Twain  become,  as 
some  critics  are  now  calling  him,  "  our  foremost  man 
of  letters." 

He  was  geographically  an  American;  he  knew  his 
land  and  its  idioms  at  first  hand — Missouri,  the  Missis- 
sippi River  and  its  banks,  Nevada,  California,  New 
England,  New  York,  the  great  cities.  It  was  insuffi- 
ciently recognized  before  his  time  that  to  love  one's 
country  intelligently  one  must  know  its  body,  as  well 
as  its  mind.  He  had  the  good  fortune  to  be  born  in  the 
West;  so  that,  of  course,  he  had  to  go  east — otherwise 
he  might,  instead  of  becoming  an  American,  have  re- 
mained a  mere  Bostonian  or  New  Yorker  all  his  life,  and 
never  have  learned  to  love  Chicago  and  San  Francisco  at 
all.  At  various  times  and  places,  he  was  pilot,  printer, 
editor,  reporter,  miner,  lecturer,  author,  and  publisher. 
But  during  the  first  half  of  his  life,  he  went  most  freely 
with  "  powerful  uneducated  persons,  and  with  the 
young,  and  with  the  mothers  of  families."  The  books 
in  which  he  draws  upon  his  life  in  the  West — Tom 


36   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

Sawyer,  Roughing  It,  Huckleberry  Finn,  and  Life  on 
the  Mississippi — are  almost  entirely  delightful.  They 
are  brimful  of  unreflective  boyhood  and  youth,  of  rude 
energy  and  high  spirits,  of  pluck  and  rough  adventure ; 
they  are  richly  provincial  and  spontaneous ;  they  spring 
luxuriantly  out  of  their  fresh  native  earth.  One  accepts 
them  and  rejoices  in  them  as  one  accepts  a  bluff  on  the 
Mississippi  or  as  one  rejoices  in  a  pine  tree  on  a  red 
spur  of  the  Rockies. 

It  is  when  a  frontiersman  carries  his  virtues  abroad 
that  the  lines  of  his  character  become  salient.  Mark 
Twain  was  a  self-made  man,  of  "  small  Latin  and  less 
Greek,"  deficient  in  historical  sympathy  and  imagina- 
tion, insensitive  to  delicate  social  differences,  content 
and  at  home  in  modern  workaday  realities.  I  con- 
fess with  great  apprehension  that  I  do  not  much  care 
for  his  books  of  foreign  travel.  Like  the  story  told 
on  Whittier's  birthday,  they  are  "  smart  and  satu- 
rated with  humor  " ;  but  for  some  almost  indefinable 
reason  my  emotions  fail  to  enter  into  the  spirit  of 
the  occasion.  An  uneasy  doubt  about  the  point  of  view 
binds  my  mirth  as  with  a  "  black  frost."  I  find  myself 
concerned  for  my  fellow-citizen,  the  author  behind  the 
books ;  beneath  the  surface  gaiety  the  whole  affair  seems 
to  be  of  appalling  seriousness  for  us  both.  Ostensibly 
light-hearted  burlesques  of  the  poetical  and  sentimental 
volumes  of  travel,  these  books  are  in  reality  an  amaz- 
ingly faithful  record  of  the  way  Europe  and  the  Orient 
strike  the  "  divine  average  " — the  typical  American — 
the  man  for  whom  the  world  was  created  in  1776.  Wan- 
dering through  exhumed  Pompeii,  he  peoples  its  solemn 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      37 

ruins  with  the  American  proletariat,  and  fancies  that 
he  sees  upon  the  walls  of  its  theatre  the  placard,  "  Posi- 
tively No  Free  List,  Except  Members  of  the  Press." 
He  digresses  from  an  account  of  the  ascent  of  Vesuvius 
to  compare  the  prices  of  gloves,  linen  shirts,  and  dress 
suits  in  Paris  and  in  Italy.  At  length  arrived  at  the 
summit  of  the  mountain,  he  describes  its  crater  as  a 
"  circular  ditch  " ;  some  of  the  party  light  their  cigars  in 
the  fissures ;  he  descends,  observing  that  the  volcano  is  a 
poor  affair  when  compared  with  Kilauea,  in  the  Sand- 
wich Islands.  He  visits  the  Parthenon  in  the  night; 
obviously,  the  memorable  feature  of  the  expedition  was 
robbing  the  vineyards  on  the  way  back  to  the  ship.  The 
most  famous  picture  galleries  of  Europe  are  hung  with 
"  celebrated  rubbish  " ;  the  immemorial  Mosque  of  St. 
Sophia  is  the  "  mustiest  barn  in  heathendom  " ;  the  Sea 
of  Galilee  is  nothing  to  Lake  Tahoe.  The  Mississippi 
pilot,  homely,  naive,  arrogantly  candid,  refuses  to  sink 
his  identity  in  the  object  contemplated — that,  as  Cor- 
poral Nym  would  have  said,  is  the  humor  of  it.  He  is 
the  kind  of  traveling  companion  that  makes  you  wonder 
why  you  went  abroad.  He  turns  the  Old  World  into  a 
laughing-stock  by  shearing  it  of  its  storied  humanity — 
simply  because  there  is  nothing  in  him  to  respond  to  the 
glory  that  was  Greece,  to  the  grandeur  that  was  Rome — 
simply  because  nothing  is  holier  to  him  than  a  joke. 
He  does  not  merely  throw  the  comic  light  upon  counter- 
feit enthusiasm ;  he  laughs  at  art,  history,  and  antiquity 
from  the  point  of  view  of  one  who  is  ignorant  of  them 
and  pretty  well  satisfied  with  his  ignorance.  And,  unless 
I  am  very  much  mistaken,  the  "  overwhelming  major- 


ity  "  of  his  fellow-citizens — those  who  made  the  success 
of  Innocents  Abroad  and  A  Tramp  Abroad — have 
laughed  with  him,  not  at  him.  So,  too,  unquestionably, 
in  the  nearly  parallel  case  of  the  bludgeoning  burlesque, 
A  Connecticut  Yankee  at  King  Arthur's  Court. 

There  is  always  a  great  multitude  of  what  Matthew 
Arnold  calls  Philistines  ready  to  rise  up  and  hail  as  a 
deliverer  any  bold  influential  spokesman  who  will  rail 
against  the  idea  of  "  the  saving  remnant,"  and  will 
assure  the  world  that  it  is  an  idle  affectation,  an  anaemic 
refinement,  to  pretend  to  admire  the  sort  of  things  that 
Matthew  Arnold  urged  us  to  admire.  In  Mark  Twain's 
frequent  excursions  into  literary  criticism  there  is  a  note 
which  escapes  being  demagogic  only  by  being  extrava- 
gantly and  comically  sincere.  Let  us  take  for  example 
this  little  burst  of  revolt  against  the  English  classics  in 
Following  the  Equator: 

Also,  to  be  fair,  there  is  another  word  of  praise  due  to 
this  ship's  library:  it  contains  no  copy  of  the  Vicar  of 
Wakefield,  that  strange  menagerie  of  complacent  hypocrites 
and  idiots,  of  theatrical  cheap-John  heroes  and  heroines, 
who  are  always  showing  off,  of  bad  people  who  are  not 
interesting,  and  good  people  who  are  fatiguing.  A  singular 
book.  Not  a  sincere  line  in  it,  and  not  a  character  that 
invites  respect;  a  book  which  is  one  long  waste-pipe  dis- 
charge of  goody-goody  puerilities  and  dreary  moralities;  a 
book  which  is  full  of  pathos  which  revolts  and  humor  which 
grieves  the  heart.  .  .  . 

Jane  Austen's  books,  too,  are  absent  from  this  library. 
Just  that  one  omission  alone  would  make  a  fairly  good 
library  out  of  a  library  that  hadn't  a  book  in  it. 

When  a  reader  of  cultivated  taste  comes  upon  a 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      39 

passage  like  that,  he  sighs  and  says,  "  Mark  Twain 
was  not  a  literary  critic  " ;  but  when  the  "  man  in  the 
street  "  comes  upon  such  a  passage,  he  chuckles  and 
says,  "  Mark  Twain  was  an  honest  man."  As  there  are 
always  more  men  in  the  street  than  readers  of  culti- 
vated taste,  Mark  Twain  is  justified  by  a  large  popular 
majority.  It  thus  appears  that  what  endears  a  public 
man  to  us  is  what  he  has  in  common  with  us — not  his 
occasional  supereminences.  It  does  not  damage  Frank- 
lin to  say  that  he  was  not  so  graceful  as  Lord  Chester- 
field ;  nor  Lincoln  to  say  that  he  was  not  so  handsome 
as  Count  D'Orsay;  nor  Mr.  Roosevelt  to  say  that  one 
misses  in  his  literary  style  I  know  not  what  that  one 
finds  in  the  style  of  Walter  Pater.  Writing  from  Khar- 
tum, our  Lion  hunter  tells  us  that,  in  consequence  of 
hard  service  in  camp,  his  pigskin  books  were  "  stained 
with  blood,  sweat,  gun  oil,  dust,  and  ashes."  We  have  a 
mystical  feeling  that  this  is  very  appropriate  and  beau- 
tiful— that  an  American's  books  ought  to  be  stained 
with  gun  oil  and  ashes.  "  Fear  grace — fear  delicatesse," 
cries  the  author  of  "  Chants  Democratic."  It  does  not 
damage  Mark  Twain  with  his  constituency  to  say  that 
there  was  not  a  drop  of  the  aristocrat  in  his  veins. 

His  disrespect  for  aristocratic  institutions  and  dis- 
tinctions both  in  life  and  in  literature  is  piquantly  illus- 
trated by  his  criticism  of  the  French  Revolution,  Sir 
Walter  Scott,  and  the  American  South  in  Life  on  the 


Against  the  crimes  of  the  French  Revolution  and  of 
Bonaparte  may  be  set  two  compensating  benefactions:  the 
Revolution  broke  the  chains  of  the  ancien  regime  and  of  the 


40       ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

Church,  and  made  a  nation  of  abject  slaves  a  nation  of  free- 
men; and  Bonaparte  instituted  the  setting  of  merit  above 
birth,  and  also  so  completely  stripped  the  divinity  from 
royalty  that,  whereas  crowned  heads  in  Europe  were  gods 
before,  they  are  only  men  since,  and  can  never  be  gods 
again,  but  only  figure-heads,  and  answerable  for  their  acts 
like  common  clay.  Such  benefactions  as  these  compensate 
the  temporary  harm  which  Bonaparte  and  the  Revolution 
did,  and  leave  the  world  in  debt  to  them  for  these  great  and 
permanent  services  to  liberty,  humanity,  and  progress. 

Then  comes  Sir  Walter  Scott  with  his  enchantments,  and 
by  his  single  might  checks  this  wave  of  progress,  and  even 
turns  it  back;  sets  the  world  in  love  with  dreams  and  phan- 
toms; with  decayed  and  degraded  systems  of  government; 
with  the  silliness  and  emptiness,  sham  grandeurs,  sham 
gauds,  and  sham  chivalries  of  a  brainless  and  worthless 
long-vanished  society.  He  did  measureless  harm;  more  real 
and  lasting  harm,  perhaps,  than  any  other  individual  that 
ever  wrote.  Most  of  the  world  has  now  outlived  a  good 
part  of  these  harms,  though  by  no  means  all  of  them;  but 
in  our  South  they  flourish  pretty  forcefully  still.  Not  so 
forcefully  as  half  a  generation  ago,  perhaps,  but  still  force- 
fully. There,  the  genuine  and  wholesome  civilization  of  the 
nineteenth  century  (my  italics)  is  curiously  confused  and 
commingled  with  the  Walter  Scott  Middle-Age  sham  civi- 
lization, and  so  you  have  practical  common-sense,  progres- 
sive ideas,  and  progressive  work,  mixed  up  with  the  duel, 
the  inflated  speech,  and  the  jejune  romanticism  of  an  absurd 
past  that  is  dead,  and  out  of  charity  ought  to  be  buried. 
But  for  the  Sir  Walter  disease,  the  character  of  the  South- 
erner— or  Southron,  according  to  Sir  Walter's  starchier 
way  of  phrasing  it — would  be  wholly  modern,  in  place  of 
modern  and  mediaeval  mixed,  and  the  South  would  be  fully 
a  generation  further  advanced  than  it  is.  It  was  Sir  Walter 
that  made  every  gentleman  in  the  South  a  major  or  a 
colonel,  or  a  general  or  a  judge,  before  the  war;  and  it  was 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      41 

he,  also,  that  made  these  gentlemen  value  the  bogus  decora- 
tions. For  it  was  he  that  created  rank  and  caste  down  there, 
and  also  reverence  for  rank  and  caste,  and  pride  and 
pleasure  in  them. 

As  this  passage  Indicates,  Mark  Twain  was  a  radical, 
resolute,  and  rather  uncritical  democrat,  committed  to 
the  principles  of  the  preamble  to  the  Constitution,  pre- 
serving a  tang  of  Tom  Paine's  contempt  for  kings,  and 
not  without  a  suggestion  of  the  republican  insolence 
caricatured  by  Dickens  in  Martin  Chuzzlewit.  He  did 
not  and  could  not  give  a  "  square  deal "  to  the  South 
or  to  Scott  or  to  Europe  or  to  the  Arthurian  realm. 
He  refused  all  recognition  to  aristocratic  virtues  which 
retard  the  complete  establishment  of  the  brotherhood 
of  man.  He  was  not,  like  some  more  exquisite  men  of 
letters,  a  democrat  in  his  study  and  a  snob  in  his  draw- 
ing-room; he  was  of  the  people  and  for  the  people  at 
all  times.  His  tender  regard  for  the  social  contract 
permeated  his  humor.  It  will  be  remembered  that 
Pudd'nhead  Wilson  earned  his  nickname  and  ruined  his 
chances  as  a  lawyer  for  twenty  years  by  an  incompre- 
hensible remark  about  a  howling  dog.  "  I  wish  I  owned 
half  of  that  dog,"  said  Wilson.  "Why?"  somebody 
asked.  "  Because  I  would  kill  my  half."  No  one 
understood  him — the  sensitive,  symbolic  democracy  of 
the  expression  was  too  compact  for  their  intelligence, 
and  they  fell  into  a  delicious  discussion  of  how  one-half 
could  be  killed  without  injury  to  the  other  half.  That, 
to  be  sure,  is  also  one  of  the  problems  of  democracy; 
but  Wilson's  implications  were,  I  believe,  both  simpler 
and  deeper  than  that.  In  not  molesting  another  man's 


dog  he  showed  the  American  reverence  for  property. 
The  American  desire  to  be  moderately  well-to-do  (Mr. 
Roosevelt's  "  neither  rich  nor  poor  ")  he  indicated  by 
desiring  to  own  only  half  the  dog.  In  saying  that  he 
would  kill  his  half  he  expressed  his  sacred  and  inalien- 
able right  to  dispose  of  his  own  property  as  he  chose, 
while  at  the  same  time  he  recognized  his  neighbor's 
sacred  and  inalienable  right  to  let  his  half  of  the  prop- 
erty howl.  Indeed,  I  am  not  sure  that  he  did  not  recog- 
nize that  the  dog  had  a  certain  property  right  in 
howling. 

With  almost  every  qualification  for  a  successful  politi- 
cal career,  Mark  Twain  could  never  have  aspired  to  the 
Presidency,  for  he  was  not  a  regular  attendant  at 
church,  a  shortcoming,  by  the  way,  which  interfered 
seriously  with  Mr.  Taft's  campaign  till  his  former  pas- 
tor testified  in  the  public  prints  that  the  candidate  had 
once  at  a  church  social  taken  the  part  of  a  fairy.  In 
religion,  Twain  appeared  to  be  a  mugwump,  or,  more 
classically  speaking,  an  agnostic  over  whom  had  fallen 
the  shadow  of  Robert  Ingersoll  of  pious  memory.  The 
irreligion  of  that  generation  is  touched  with  a  raw, 
philistine  rationalism,  but  is  thoroughly  honest.  Like 
all  Americans,  the  author  of  Tom  Sawyer  received  his 
religious  culture  in  the  Sunday-school,  but  stumbled 
over  the  book  of  Genesis  and  kindred  difficulties,  and  was 
"  emancipated."  The  loss  of  faith  which,  in  certain 
conditions,  is  a  terrible  bereavement,  was  to  him  a  blessed 
relief ;  when  the  God  of  the  old-fashioned  Sunday-school 
and  the  camp  meeting  ceases  to  terrify,  he  ordinarily 
becomes  a  deadly  bore.  Having  never  known  the  mag- 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      43 

nificent  poetry  of  faith,  he  never  felt  the  magnificent 
melancholy  of  unbelief.  His  experience  was  typical, 
however,  and  his  very  unspirituality  was  social.  In  his 
examination  of  Christian  Science,  he  admitted  that  every 
man  is  entitled  to  his  own  favorite  brand  of  insanity, 
and  insisted  that  he  himself  was  as  insane  as  anybody. 
That  was  enough  to  assure  most  of  us  that  he  was  sound 
on  "  all  essentials." 

"  Be  good  and  you  will  be  lonesome  "  is,  I  suppose, 
one  of  Mark  Twain's  most  widely  quoted  utterances  in 
the  field  of  morals.  At  first  thought,  one  may  wonder 
why  this  apparently  Bohemian  apothegm  should  have 
taken  such  hold  upon  the  heart  of  a  nation  which  above 
all  things  else  adores  virtue.  But  the  difficulty  disap- 
pears the  instant  one  reflects  that  these  seven  words 
express  by  implication  precisely  the  kind  and  temper  of 
virtue  that  the  nation  adores.  Like  Wilson's  observation 
on  the  dog,  the  saying  is  cryptic  and  requires  explica- 
tion. Mark  Twain  tells  us  in  his  autobiography  that 
when  he  was  a  boy  his  mother  always  allowed  about 
thirty  per  cent,  on  what  he  said  for  "  embroidery  "  and 
so  "  struck  his  average."  The  saying  means,  as  I  take 
it,  first  of  all,  Don't  lose  your  sense  of  humor  as  those 
do  who  become  infatuated  with  their  own  particular 
hobbies  in  goodness.  Calculate  to  keep  about  in  the 
middle  of  the  road,  but  make  allowance  for  all  reasonable 
shades  of  difference  in  taste  and  opinion.  Don't  be  too 
good  or  you  will  find  yourself  in  a  barren  and  uninfluen- 
tial  minority  of  one.  In  America,  whatever  is  not  social 
is  not  virtue.  Mark  Twain  seems  to  have  felt  that  the 
New  England  Puritans  were  "too  good  to  be  true"; 


44   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

that  the  American  people  could  never  get  together  on 
the  high  levels  of  New  England  spirituality.  In  his 
interesting  series  of  dialogues,  What  Is  Man?,  he  re- 
duces all  the  motives  of  human  conduct  to  self-interest ; 
but,  like  Benjamin  Franklin,  who  set  out  from  a  similar 
position,  he  reaches  the  conclusion  that  an  enlightened 
self-interest  is  not  at  war  with  the  interests  of  others. 
"  Diligently  train  your  ideals  upward,"  he  says,  "  and 
still  upward  toward  a  summit  where  you  will  find  your 
chiefest  pleasure  in  conduct  which,  while  contenting  you, 
will  be  sure  to  confer  benefits  upon  your  neighbor  and 
the  community."  When  he  put  his  shoulder  under  the 
debts  of  his  bankrupt  publishing  house,  he  took  a  clear 
stand  on  one  of  the  essentials  of  a  national  "  code." 
In  his  chivalric  treatment  of  Joan  of  Arc  and  Harriet 
Shelley  he  showed  the  spirit  animating  another  funda- 
mental American  tradition,  which,  it  is  to  be  hoped,  our 
iconoclasts  will  not  be  able  to  destroy.  Fond  of  strong 
language,  careless  of  peccadilloes,  tolerant  of  human 
frailities  though  he  was,  his  feet  were  "mortised  and 
tenoned  "  in  domestic  rectitude  and  common  morality. 
Mark  Twain  does  not  give  us  much  help  toward  real- 
izing our  best  selves ;  but  he  is  a  rock  of  refuge  when  the 
ordinary  self — "  the  divine  average  "  is  in  danger.  As 
some  one  has  said,  "  We  cannot  live  always  on  the  cold 
heights  of  the  sublime — the  thin  air  stifles."  We  can- 
not flush  always  with  the  high  ardor  of  the  signers  of 
the  Declaration,  nor  remain  at  the  level  of  the  address 
at  Gettysburg,  nor  cry  continually,  "  O  Beautiful !  My 
country !  "  Yet,  in  the  long  dull  interspaces  between 
these  sacred  moments  we  need  some  one  to  remind  us 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      45 

that  we  are  a  nation.  For  in  the  dead  vast  and  middle 
of  the  years  insidious  foes  are  stirring — anaemic  refine- 
ments, cosmopolitan  decadencies,  Teutonic  heresies, 
imperial  lusts,  fraud  and  corruption,  the  cold  sickening 
of  the  heart  at  reiterated  expressions  of  unfaith  in  the 
outcome  of  the  democratic  experiment.  When  our  coun- 
trymen migrate  because  we  have  no  kings  or  castles,  we 
are  thankful  to  any  one  who  will  tell  us  what  we  can 
count  on.  When  they  complain  that  our  soil  lacks  the 
humanity  essential  to  great  literature,  we  are  grateful 
even  for  the  firing  of  a  national  joke  heard  round  the 
world.  And  when  Mark  Twain,  robust,  big-hearted, 
gifted  with  the  divine  power  to  use  words,  makes  us  all 
laugh  together,  builds  true  romances  with  prairie  fire 
and  Western  clay,  and  shows  us  that  we  are  at  one  on 
all  the  main  points,  we  feel  that  he  has  been  appointed 
by  Providence  to  see  to  it  that  the  precious  ordinary 
self  of  the  Republic  shall  suffer  no  harm. 

Postscript 

Good  manuscripts  are  not  often  interred  with  the 
bones  of  great  writers,  nor  published  after  their  death ; 
but  Mark  Twain,  as  his  biographer  explained  to  us, 
lived  under  a  somewhat  stringent  domestic  censorship, 
that  of  Mrs.  Clemens,  which  renders  his  case  exceptional. 
The  Mysterious  Stranger,  first  published  in  1916,  one 
surmises  was  suppressed  and  pigeonholed  not  because 
it  was  below  the  author's  literary  standard,  but  because 
it  was  regarded  by  some  censor  or  other  as  indiscreet. 
Literary  discretion  consists  in  continuing  to  write  in 


46   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

one's  popular  vein — consists  in  expressing  the  common- 
sense  of  one's  constituency.  When  Mark  Twain  wrote 
in  his  popular  vein  he  expressed  a  fairly  cheerful  and 
quite  unabashed  familiarity  with  the  "  buzzing,  bloom- 
ing confusion  " — the  habitual  temper  of  his  country- 
men. But  The  Mysterious  Stranger  he  apparently 
wrote  to  please  himself;  he  expressed  in  it  his  personal 
and  intimate  sense  of  an  unsatisfactory  world ;  he  gave 
vent  to  feelings  too  irregular,  too  bitter,  and  too  subtle 
to  please  all  the  lovers  of  Tom  Sawyer  and  Huck  Finn. 
He  revealed,  in  short,  the  undercurrent  of  his  humor. 
Upon  one  who  is  acquainted  with  his  other  works  the 
effect  of  this  revelation  is  to  deepen  the  note  of  his 
gaiety  throughout,  making  it  appear  the  reflex  of  unex- 
pectedly somber  considerations.  Like  the  revelations 
with  regard  to  Charles  Lamb's  domestic  affairs,  like 
certain  cynical  and  pessimistic  passages  in  the  letters 
of  another  characteristically  American  humorist,  John 
Hay,  it  lets  one  in  to  a  temperament  and  character  of 
more  gravity,  complexity,  and  interest  than  the  surfaces 
indicated. 

The  artfulness  of  the  book,  in  which  illustrator  and 
publisher  have  had  a  part,  sends  one  for  comparison 
to  the  Travels  of  Lemuel  Gulliver.  The  point  is,  as  I 
have  proved  by  experiment,  that  a  boy  of  nine  can  read 
this  brightly  pictured  magical  romance  of  the  sixteenth 
century  with  delight  and  without  undesirable  stimula- 
tion. He  will  take  pleasure  with  the  three  lads  of  Esel- 
dorf  (he  probably  will  not  Anglicize  the  name  of  this 
Austrian  village)  in  the  ingenious  marvels  wrought  by 
the  mysterious  stranger.  He  will  be  gently  touched  in 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      47 

his  compassionate  instincts  by  the  witch-hunting  scenes 
and  by  the  strange  pathos  of  sudden  death  supernatur- 
ally  foreseen.  But  he  will  not  raise  embarrassing  re- 
ligious or  metaphysical  questions,  for  the  air  of  enchant- 
ment and  romance  intervenes  between  this  fiction  and 
the  world  of  his  serious  concern.  He  will  ingenuously 
accept  Eseldorf  as  an  unusually  animated  province  of 
wonderland.  He  will  be  quite  unconscious  that  he  has 
read  a  book  written  at  his  elders,  a  book  steeped  in 
irony,  a  dangerous  "  atheistical "  book,  presenting  a 
wholly  unorthodox  view  of  the  devil  and  a  biting 
arraignment  of  the  folly  and  brutality  of  mankind. 

Mark  Twain  was  one  of  many  men  of  his  generation 
who  early  received  an  untenable  conception  of  God, 
tried  the  conception  by  human  standards,  and  dismissed 
it  as  untenable.  There  are  two  priests  and  an  astrologer 
in  Eseldorf;  but  there  is  no  God.  His  functions  are 
pretty  completely  taken  over  by  the  mysterious  stranger 
who  candidly  announces  himself  as  Satan,  nephew  to  the 
well-known  gentleman  of  that  name.  He  is  a  well-fa- 
vored and  winsome  youth  with  a  "  winy  "  invigorating 
atmosphere.  Essentially  he  is  the  incarnation  of  vital 
force,  the  creative  power  in  the  universe.  Knowing 
all  things,  having  power  over  all  things,  he  despises 
man  and  is  mildly  amused  by  him,  looks  down  upon  him 
as  an  elephant  looks  down  upon  a  red  spider,  sends  him 
to  death  or  torment  without  malice  and  without  a  pang. 
His  conduct  shines  in  comparison  with  that  of  man ;  for 
though  he  is  without  good-will,  he  is  without  ill-will 
also,  and  he  has  intelligence  and  power.  In  comparison 
with  the  conduct  of  man,  moreover,  the  conduct  of  dumb 


48   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

animals  shines ;  for  though  they  lack  some  useful  facul- 
ties, they  are  blest  in  freedom  from  the  "  Moral  Sense  " 
— that  terrible  human  faculty  which  organizes  and  legal- 
izes and  perpetuates  cruelty  and  folly. 

It  is  not  "  tonic  "  to  look  at  men  through  the  eyes 
of  the  mysterious  stranger ;  to  him  "  their  foolish  little 
life  is  but  a  laugh,  a  sigh,  and  extinction ;  and  they  have 
no  sense.  Only  the  Moral  Sense."  He  alters  a  link  in 
the  life  of  one  of  the  lads  of  Eseldorf,  to  whom  he  has 
taken  a  fancy,  so  that  he  shall  drown;  this  alteration, 
he  explains  to  the  boy's  playmates,  is  a  real  kindness, 
for  "  he  had  a  billion  possible  careers,  but  not  one  of 
them  was  worth  living."  He  shows  to  the  boys  a  vision 
of  human  history;  they  see  Caesar  invade  Britain — 
"  not  that  those  barbarians  had  done  him  any  harm,  but 
because  he  wanted  their  land,  and  desired  to  confer  the 
blessings  of  civilization  upon  their  widows  and  orphans." 
"  You  see,"  says  Satan,  "  that  you  have  made  continual 
progress.  Cain  did  his  murder  with  a  club ;  the  Hebrews 
did  their  murders  with  javelins  and  swords;  the  Greeks 
and  Romans  added  protective  armor  and  the  fine  arts 
of  military  organization  and  generalship ;  the  Christian 
has  added  guns  and  gunpowder;  a  few  centuries  from 
now  he  will  so  greatly  have  improved  the  deadly  effec- 
tiveness of  his  weapons  of  slaughter  that  all  men  will 
confess  that  without  Christian  civilization  war  must 
have  remained  a  poor  and  trifling  thing  to  the  end  of 
time." 

Relief  from  this  irony  and  cynicism  is,  of  course,  not 
afforded  by  the  presence  of  Satan  or  Nature  in  the 
romance.  The  relieving  contrast  to  the  folly  and 


THE  DEMOCRACY  OF  MARK  TWAIN      49 

cruelty  depicted  is  in  the  felt  presence  of  the  chivalrous 
heart  and  mind  of  Mark  Twain  himself,  in  his  definite 
conception  of  certain  evils  to  be  removed,  in  his  hopeful- 
ness about  the  possibility  of  removing  them.  The  wicked 
world  visited  by  the  mysterious  stranger  is,  after  all, 
sixteenth-century  Austria — not  these  States.  What 
Mark  Twain  hated  was  the  brutal  power  resident  in 
monarchies,  aristocracies,  tribal  religions,  and — minori- 
ties bent  on  mischief,  and  making  a  bludgeon  of  the 
malleable  many.  His  passion  of  hatred  for  oppression 
and  unreason  was  never  more  cuttingly  phrased  than  in 
this  posthumous  volume.  The  intensity  of  his  vision 
of  evil  has  subdued  and  darkened  his  laughter — has 
given  it  a  note  almost  like  despair ;  it  is  the  laughter  of 
an  often-outraged  believer  in  liberty,  democracy,  and 
loving-kindness. 


II 

THE  UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  H.  G.  WELLS 
(BEFOKE  THE  WAR) 

IT  is  a  singularly  incurious  person  who  has  never 
looked  into  the  books  of  H.  G.  Wells;  for  through  his 
innumerable  pages  swarm  the  figures,  flash  the  colors, 
hum  the  voices  of  strictly  contemporary  life.  Though 
he  is  on  the  brink  of  fifty,  he  remains  the  copious  and 
incessant  spokesman  for  the  Younger  Generation  which 
he  has  stung  into  consciousness  of  itself.  He  helps  us 
also  to  understand  the  stupidity  of  our  fathers  and  the 
absurdity  of  our  mothers.  When  Ann  Veronica,  in  the 
novel  bearing  her  name,  announces  her  intention  of  at- 
tending an  unchaperoned  dance  in  London  and  spend- 
ing the  remnant  of  the  night  in  a  hotel,  her  aunt  packs 
an  entire  "  system  of  ideas  "  into  the  little  apprehensive 
phrase,  "  But,  my  dear !  "  If  you  feel  that  the  exclama- 
tion is  delightfully  ridiculous,  you  may  consider  yourself 
of  the  Younger  Generation.  If  you  elevate  pained  eye- 
brows with  the  aunt,  you  must  set  yourself  down  as 
Victorian. 

When  the  Queen's  great  reign  closed  with  her  death 
in  1901,  Mr.  Wells  did  not  go  so  far  as  to  insist  that 
the  bones  of  her  statesmen  should  be  hung  in  chains  and 
the  ashes  of  her  men  of  letters  scattered  to  the  winds. 

50 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       51 

But  he  recognized,  as  did  the  court  poets  at  the  Restora- 
tion, that  the  readiest  way  to  brighten  a  new  epoch  is  to 
blacken  its  predecessor ;  violating  the  Victorians  was  an 
expedient  justified,  to  adapt  a  military  expression,  by 
literary  necessity.  Accordingly  he  has  put  into  circu- 
lation the  popular  epithets  for  the  politics,  religion,  art, 
and  morals  which  prevailed  in  the  "  dingy,  furtive,  cant- 
ing, humbugging,  English  world  "  of  our  fathers,  with 
its  "  muddled  system,"  its  "  emasculated  orthodoxy," 
its  "  shabby  subservience,"  its  "  unreasonable  prohibi- 
tions," its  "  meek  surrender  of  mind  and  body  to  the 
dictation  of  pedants  and  old  women  and  fools."  At  the 
same  time  he  has  been  giving  currency  to  the  catchwords 
of  the  new  era :  "  scientific  method,"  "  research,"  "  effi- 
ciency," "  cooperation,"  "  publicity,"  "  constructive 
statesmanship,"  "  socialism,"  "  eugenics,"  "  feminism," 
"  aviation."  When  we  open  his  works  of  fiction,  we  find 
the  Victorian  muddler,  the  prig,  the  standpatter,  and 
the  prude  making  way  for  the  clear-eyed  theorist  with 
the  "white  passion  of  statecraft,"  the  titled  lady  with 
a  penchant  for  breaking  plate  glass,  the  iconoclastic 
journalist  in  greenish-gray  tweeds  and  art-brown  tie, 
the  independent  young  schoolgirl  who  dares  to  say 
"  damn."  And  we  are  feelingly  persuaded  that  we  are 
moving,  or  that  the  world  has  rolled  on  and  left  us 
behind. 

A  writer  so  full  of  tendency  as  Mr.  Wells,  constantly 
setting  father  against  son  and  son  against  father,  is 
obviously  something  more  or  less  than  a  novelist,  quite 
irrespective  of  his  sociological  treatises.  In  the  state 
of  literary  manners  existing  under  George  V,  it  is  a  bit 


52       ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

difficult,  however,  to  determine  whether  a  man  of  letters 
who  comes  forward  with  a  new  order  of  ideas  is  a  hum- 
bug or  a  philosopher.  While  I  was  pondering  this 
delicate  essential  question  in  the  case  of  Mr.  Wells, 
there  came  into  my  hands  a  study  l  of  the  man  and  his 
works  by  a  critic  of  the  younger  generation,  Mr.  Van 
Wyck  Brooks,  which  helped  me  out  of  an  embarrassing 
situation.  "  Grotesque  and  violent  as  it  may  at  first 
appear,"  says  Mr.  Brooks,  "  I  believe  that  in  the  future 
Wells  will  be  thought  of  as  having  played  toward  his 
own  epoch  a  part  very  similar  to  that  played  by  Mat- 
thew Arnold." 

I  was  glad  to  be  assured  that  Mr.  Wells's  air  of  pas- 
sionate earnestness  and  transparent  candor  was  not 
merely  an  aspect  of  his  literary  technique.  And  I 
seized  eagerly  upon  the  suggested  parallelism ;  for,  as  I 
said  to  myself,  if  Wells  is  the  Arnold  of  our  time,  by 
instituting  a  series  of  comparisons  between  the  two  men 
we  may  measure  the  "  march  of  mind "  in  the  post- 
Victorian  period,  and  demonstrate  the  superiority  of  the 
ideas  open  to  our  young  people  over  those  set  before 
their  elders.  But  as  I  glanced  down  the  page,  I  per- 
ceived that  the  likeness  of  Arnold  and  Wells  was  not 
limited  to  their  general  function  in  bringing  home  to 
the  English  mind  "  a  range  of  ideas  not  traditional  in 
it."  That  likeness  extends,  it  seems,  to  "  their  specific 
attitudes  toward  most  of  the  branches  of  thought  and 
action  they  have  concerned  themselves  with.  Wells  on 
Education,  on  Criticism,  on  Politics,  and  the  nostrums 
of  Liberalism;  Wells,  even  on  Religion,  continues  the 
1  The  World  of  H.  G.  Wells  By  Van  Wyck  Brooks.  New  York. 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       53 

propaganda  of  Arnold.  Everywhere  in  these  so  super- 
ficially dissimilar  writings  is  exhibited  the  same  fine  dis- 
satisfaction, the  same  faith  in  ideas  and  standards,  the 
same  dislike  of  heated  bungling,  plunging,  wilfulness, 
and  confusion ;  even  the  same  predominant  contempt  for 
most  things  that  are,  the  same  careful  vagueness  of 
ideal." 

Though  I  share  the  critic's  desire  to  relate  Mr.  Wells 
in  some  way  to  his  predecessors,  I  was  reluctant  to 
acquiesce  in  the  implications  of  this  series  of  compari- 
sons. For  one  point  I  supposed  was  entirely  certain — 
that  Wells  repudiated  the  Victorians ;  and  here  was  Mr. 
Brooks  making  him  out  the  spiritual  son  and  heir  of 
one  of  their  leading  representatives.  With  a  little  effort, 
I  believed,  a  spiritual  ancestor  with  a  more  appealing 
likeness  to  his  descendant  could  have  been  discovered 
outside  the  age  of  compromise  and  muddle.  Arnold,  as 
I  thought,  was  disqualified  for  the  relationship  by  char- 
acteristics which  he  shared  with  most  of  the  reforming 
novelists  of  his  sluggish  period.  I  refer  to  their  habit 
of  dealing,  "  confusedly,"  no  doubt,  with  realities,  and 
to  the  modesty  of  their  enterprises.  Dickens,  Kingsley, 
Reade,  Mrs.  Stowe,  and  the  rest — they  did  not  seek  to 
make  the  world  over,  but  only  to  accomplish  a  few  simple 
things  like  abolishing  slavery,  sweat-shops,  Corn  Laws, 
the  schools  of  Squeers,  imprisonment  for  debt,  the  red 
tape  of  legal  procedure,  the  belief  in  pestilence  and 
typhoid  as  visitations  of  God — and  all  that  sort  of  pid- 
dling amelioration. 

What  Wells  required  in  the  way  of  an  ancestor  was  a 
man  with  a  large  free  gesture,  like  Godwin  or  Rousseau, 


54   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

sweeping  away  the  Daedalian  labyrinth  of  existing 
society,  and  with  a  few  bold  strokes  chalking  out  a  new 
social  order.  Shelley  might  serve ;  he  was  like  Wells  in 
striving  "  to  bring  home  to  the  English  mind  a  range  of 
ideas  not  traditional  in  it  " ;  and  he  showed  other  points 
of  similarity.  In  both  Shelley  and  Wells  we  find  the 
same  fierce  railing  at  conventional  and  customary 
things,  the  same  eager  projecting  and  reforming  temper, 
the  same  childlike  faith  in  the  possibility  of  refashioning 
human  nature,  the  same  absorbed  interest  in  sex,  and 
the  same  abandonment  of  an  eagerly  pursued  science 
for  the  sake  of  writing  romances. 

Though  in  these  general  respects  Shelley  was  like 
Wells,  Shelley  was  not  in  the  least  like  Arnold,  who,  as 
will  be  remembered,  dismissed  him  as  a  beautiful  but 
ineffectual  angel.  I  was  thus  driven  to  conclude  that 
the  really  decisive  likeness  which  Mr.  Brooks  saw  be- 
tween Wells  and  Arnold  was  not  in  their  general  func- 
tion and  temper,  but  in  "  their  specific  attitudes  toward 
most  of  the  branches  of  thought  and  action  they  have 
concerned  themselves  with."  Yet  having  by  this  time 
conceived  a  partiality  for  my  own  literary  parallel,  I 
subconsciously  ran  it  out  alongside  that  of  Mr.  Brooks, 
while  I  was  examining  his  contention  that  the  prophet 
of  the  Younger  Generation  has  continued  the  propa- 
ganda of  the  "  elegant  Jeremiah  "  of  the  Victorians. 

Wells,  we  are  told,  continues  the  propaganda  of 
Arnold  with  regard  to  education.  The  error  involved 
here  could  have  been  made  only  in  an  age  more  con- 
cerned about  its  educational  machinery  than  about  its 
educational  product.  It  is  perfectly  true  that  both 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       55 

Wells  and  Arnold  wish  the  state  to  organize  and  stand- 
ardize instruction.  The  vital  question,  however,  is 
whether  they  agree  upon  what  the  state  schools  are  to 
teach,  and  upon  what  is  the  "  objective  "  of  teaching. 

It  will  hardly  be  disputed  that  if  educators  have  any- 
thing in  common  it  is  the  desire  of  each  to  reproduce 
his  own  educational  species.  Wells  was  trained  at  the 
Royal  College  of  Science  in  physics,  chemistry,  astron- 
omy, geology,  and  botany;  Arnold  was  trained  at  the 
University  of  Oxford  in  the  traditional  classical  disci- 
plines. Wells  belongs  indubitably  to  the  scientific 
species  of  educator,  distinguished  by  its  devotion  to 
original  research  and  by  its  steadfast  belief  that  the 
crown  of  human  endeavor  is  an  extension  of  the  bound- 
aries of  knowledge.  Arnold  belongs  indubitably  to  the 
humanistic  species  of  educator,  distinguished  by  the 
importance  it  attaches  to  the  assimilation  of  classical 
experience  in  the  attainment  of  its  highest  end,  the  per- 
fection of  the  individual  character. 

When  Wells  outlines  a  model  course  for  the  schools 
of  the  future,  he  discards  Greek  and  Latin,  and  pre- 
scribes as  the  "  backbone  "  of  a  sound  curriculum  as 
much  mathematics  as  possible,  English,  and  the  natural 
sciences.  When  Arnold,  after  thirty  years'  experience 
as  inspector  of  schools,  delivers  in  America  the  essence 
of  his  educational  ideas,  he  tells  us  that  for  most  men  a 
little  mathematics  suffices ;  that  Greek  will  be  "  increas- 
ingly studied  as  men  increasingly  feel  the  need  in  them 
for  beauty  and  how  powerfully  Greek  art  and  literature 
can  serve  this  need  " ;  and  that  if  there  is  to  be  a  separa- 
tion and  option  between  humane  letters  and  natural 


56       ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

sciences,  the  majority  of  men  would  do  well  "  to  choose 
to  be  educated  in  humane  letters  rather  than  in  the 
natural  sciences."  For,  argues  Arnold,  humane  letters 
help  a  man's  soul  to  get  soberness,  righteousness,  and 
wisdom ;  while  in  the  sphere  of  conduct,  which  is  three- 
fourths  of  life,  the  natural  sciences  are  comparatively 
impotent,  leaving  the  moral  nature  undisciplined  and 
inclined  to  caprice  and  eccentricity.  Arnold  maliciously 
cites  the  case  of  Faraday,  that  eminent  man  of  science, 
who  was  a  Sandemanian ;  one  thinks  also  of  Shelley,  who 
emerged  from  his  passionate  study  of  chemistry  at 
Oxford,  declaring  that  the  happiness  of  the  human  race 
depends  upon  the  adoption  of  a  vegetable  diet ;  and  one 
remembers  the  many  heroes  and  heroines  of  Wells  who 
have  been  bred  on  the  natural  sciences,  and  how  they 
apply  their  zoological  observations  to  the  conduct  of 
life.  If,  finally,  we  recall  together  the  fact  that  Wells 
is  a  pupil  and  disciple  of  Huxley,  and  the  fact  that 
Arnold's  Science  and  Literature  is  rather  explicitly  an 
attack  upon  the  new  educational  programs  inspired  by 
Huxley,  it  should  be  clear  that  Wells  came  into  the 
world  to  condemn  the  educational  ideas  of  Arnold. 

It  is  true  that  both  Wells  and  Arnold  insist  upon  the 
importance  of  fearless  criticism — the  free  play  of  ideas 
upon  all  the  subjects  which  concern  us.  But  here  again, 
before  we  agree  that  one  continued  the  work  of  the 
other,  it  is  essential  to  know  the  standpoint  adopted, 
the  method  pursued,  and  the  object  contemplated  by 
each. 

At  the  risk  of  verbal  absurdity  one  is  obliged  to  say 
that  Wells  as  critic  takes  his  stand  with  the  future 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       57 

behind  him ;  that  he  retreats  into  the  future  for  light  on 
the  problems  of  the  present;  and  that  the  object  of  his 
criticism  is  to  enable  us  to  see  things  as  in  themselves 
they  really  are  not.  And,  to  continue  the  Hibernian 
contrast,  Arnold  takes  his  stand  with  the  past  behind 
him ;  he  turns  to  history  for  light  on  the  questions  of  the 
day;  and  his  object,  as  he  never  tires  in  repeating,  is  to 
enable  us  to  see  things  as  in  themselves  they  really  are. 

This  wide  difference  in  critical  object,  method,  and 
standpoint  arises  from  the  fundamental  opposition  be- 
tween, let  us  say,  the  pseudo-scientific  and  the  human- 
istic outlook  upon  life.  Wells,  whose  philosophy  took 
shape  in  the  biological  laboratory  as  under  the  micro- 
scope the  bounds  which  seemed  to  hold  individuals  in 
fixed  species  disappeared  and  everything  merged  in 
everything  else  by  an  infinite  scale  of  infinitesimal  differ- 
ences— Wells  is  profoundly  impressed  by  the  uniqueness 
of  every  atom  in  the  universe,  and  hence  by  the  impossi- 
bility of  formulating  any  law  valid  for  any  two  atoms. 
Arnold,  whose  philosophy  took  shape  as  he  studied  the 
moral  rather  than  the  physical  history  of  man,  is  pro- 
foundly impressed  by  the  identity  of  human  passions 
and  human  needs  in  Palestine,  Greece,  and  England; 
and  hence  by  the  possibility  of  discovering  law  valid  for 
civilized  men  everywhere  and  at  all  times. 

We  have  here  an  explanation  of  the  curious  fact  that 
the  critic  of  scientific  training  abandons  the  "  scientific 
method  "  and  proceeds  from  the  unknown  to  the  known, 
while  the  critic  trained  in  humane  letters  adopts  the 
"  scientific  method  "  and  proceeds  from  the  known  to 
the  unknown.  I  mean  that  Wells,  in  his  skepticism  of 


58   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

the  categories  established  by  the  intellect,  throws  reason 
overboard,  and  commits  the  steerage  of  his  course  to 
a  self-willed,  egoistic,  anarchical  imagination.  "  I  make 
my  beliefs,"  he  says,  "  as  I  want  them.  I  do  not  attempt 
to  go  to  fact  for  them.  I  make  them  thus  and  not  thus 
exactly  as  an  artist  makes  a  picture  so  and  not  so." 
For  Arnold,  who  retains  his  faith  in  the  intellect,  truth 
is  not  something  to  be  created,  but  something  to  be 
ascertained.  Between  the  two  critics  yawns  this  gulf: 
Wells  seeks  to  make  whim  and  the  will  of  Wells  prevail, 
while  Arnold  seeks  to  make  "  right  reason  and  the  will 
of  God  "  prevail. 

This  distinction  holds  between  the  political  fantasies 
of  Wells  as  set  forth  in  his  various  Utopian  essays,  and 
the  political  and  social  criticisms  of  Arnold  as  set  forth 
in  his  essays  on  Democracy,  Equality,  British  Liberal- 
ism, and  Culture  and  Anarchy.  In  the  one  case,  a 
lyrical  voice  cries,  like  the  Persian  poet,  "  Come,  let  us 
drink  wine,  and  crown  our  heads  with  roses,  and  break 
up  the  tedious  roof  of  heaven  into  new  forms."  In  the 
other  case,  a  sober,  persistent  Englishman  says,  "  Let 
us  try  to  look  at  this  nineteenth  century  of  ours  steadily 
and  determine  what  can  be  done;  let  us  straighten  a 
little  here,  and  level  a  little  there,  and  elevate  a  little 
everywhere." 

A  specious  likeness  is  perhaps  observable  in  the  fact 
that  both  Wells  and  Arnold  advocate  extending  the 
powers  of  the  state.  The  likeness  itself  becomes  a 
difference  the  moment  one  reflects  that  Arnold  recom- 
mended an  increase  of  governmental  action  in  a  time 
of  laissez-faire  Liberalism  and  radical  Individualism, 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       59 

and  that  Wells  advocates  an  increase  of  governmental 
action  in  a  time  when  an  English  statesman  is  telling 
us  that  "  we  are  all  Socialists  nowadays."  It  is  not 
the  function  of  a  political  critic,  as  Arnold  reminds  us, 
to  carry  coals  to  Newcastle. 

The  difference  widens  as  soon  as  one  considers  the 
uses  to  which  Wells  and  Arnold  propose  to  put  the 
enlarged  powers  of  the  state.  Wells,  having  the  cour- 
age of  his  sanguine  imagination,  desires  to  make  the 
state  a  magnificent  reservoir  of  science  and  energy  and 
capital,  "  which  will  descend  like  water  that  the  sun  has 
sucked  out  of  the  sea,"  which  will  do  away  with  the 
necessity  of  poverty  and  labor  and  pain,  and  which  will 
abolish  "  the  last  base  reason  for  any  one's  servitude  or 
inferiority."  Arnold,  who  prefers  to  retain  some  con- 
tact with  the  realities  of  life,  phlegmatically  lays  down 
a  very  simple  principle  defining  the  limits  of  state 
action :  "  To  use  the  state  is  simply  to  use  cooperation 
of  a  superior  kind.  All  you  have  to  ask  yourselves  is 
whether  the  object  for  which  it  is  proposed  to  use  this 
cooperation  is  a  rational  and  useful  one,  and  one  likely 
to  be  best  reached  in  this  manner.  Professor  Fawcett 
says  that  Socialism's  first  lesson  is  that  the  working- 
man  can  acquire  capital  without  saving,  through  hav- 
ing capital  supplied  to  him  by  the  state,  which  is  to  serve 
as  a  fountain  of  wealth  perennially  flowing  without 
human  effort.  Well,  to  desire  to  use  the  state  for  that 
object  is  irrational,  vain,  and  mischievous.  Why?  Be- 
cause the  object  is  irrational  and  impossible." 

What  more  need  be  said  of  the  New  Republic  and 
other  ships  of  state  which  Wells,  like  Shelley  launching 


60       ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

his  paper  boats  on  the  pond  in  Kensington  Gardens, 
lets  drift  down  the  stream  of  time?  What  more  need 
be  said  but  that  Wells  himself,  like  Shelley  in  his  later 
years,  has  begun  to  despair  of  transforming  the  world 
by  state  intervention,  and  is  transferring  his  faith  to 
the  redemptive  power  of  the  "  beautiful  moral  ideal- 
isms "  embodied  in  his  own  novels ! 

Nowhere,  however,  does  the  irreconcilable  opposition 
of  Wells  and  Arnold  appear  more  distinctly  than  in 
their  respective  attitudes  toward  morality,  and  in  par- 
ticular toward  "  sexual  morality."  In  the  latter  field, 
the  Bosnia  of  the  moral  world,  Wells  has  been  an 
incessant  dropper  of  bombs.  Arnold,  in  general,  main- 
tained the  despised  Victorian  "  reticence."  One  recalls, 
nevertheless,  significant  passages  in  his  letters  express- 
ing apprehensions  for  the  future  of  France  on  the  score 
of  the  "  social  evil."  And  one  recalls  his  equally  signifi- 
cant declaration  that  Dowden's  Shelley  makes  one  feel 
"  sickened  for  ever  of  the  subject  of  irregular  relations." 

To  this  humanistic  moralist  of  the  Victorians  moral- 
ity seems  a  settled  and  simple  matter.  He  holds  that 
in  the  course  of  some  thousands  of  years  of  civilized 
society  the  elementary  principles  of  conduct  have  been 
adequately  tested,  and  are  now  to  be  unequivocally  ac- 
cepted. They  constitute  a  standard  of  "  right  reason  " 
outside  ourselves,  to  which  we  should  vigorously  sub- 
ject our  treacherous  individual  sensibilities.  By  adopt- 
ing these  principles  the  individual  acquires  a  character, 
becomes  a  member  of  civil  society,  and  performs  the  first 
duty  of  man,  which  is  to  perpetuate  in  and  through 
himself  the  moral  life  of  the  race. 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       61 

The  zoological  moralist  of  the  Younger  Generation 
holds  that  morality  is  a  new,  complex,  experimental 
science  with  its  work  all  before  it  and  only  a  vague 
generalization  fresh  from  Mr.  Wells'  laboratory  to  guide 
it.  In  order  to  get  society  upon  a  sound  moral  basis, 
says  Mr.  Wells,  it  is  essential  "  to  reject  and  set  aside 
all  abstract,  refined,  and  intellectualized  ideas  as  start- 
ing propositions,  such  ideas  as  right,  liberty,  happi- 
ness, duty,  or  beauty,  and  to  hold  fast  to  the  funda- 
mental assertion  of  life  as  a  tissue  and  succession  of 
births"  How  Sairey  Gamp  would  have  enjoyed  that 
"  tissue  and  succession  of  births  " !  Upon  this  strik- 
ing obstetrical  truth  Mr.  Wells  proposes  to  hang  Moses 
and  all  the  prophets.  Then  he  will  erect  upon  it  the 
new  morality. 

Since  life  is  fundamentally  a  tissue  and  succession  of 
births,  it  appears  to  follow  that  the  first  duty  of  man 
is  to  perpetuate  not  the  moral  but  the  physical  life  of 
the  race.  Since  "  we  don't  know  what  to  breed  for," 
orthodox  eugenics  is  all  astray.  Since  scientific  man- 
breeding,  or  zoological  ethics,  is  still  in  its  infancy,  it 
behooves  us  to  encourage  all  sorts  of  experimentation 
in  procreation,  cohabitation,  the  rehabilitation  of  nat- 
ural children,  the  state  subsidization  of  mothers,  and 
perhaps  also  of  lovers.  In  the  new  society,  instead  of 
the  Victorian  convention  which  precluded  the  married 
man  from  investigation  in  this  field,  we  shall  have  free- 
dom for  various  sex-associations,  and,  consequently,  for 
enriching  emotional  discoveries  in  what  are  now  the  dull 
years  of  domestic  fidelity  and  emotional  hebetude.  Mr. 
Wells  is  rather  fond  of  turning  the  tables  upon  the 


62   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

naughty  dramatists  of  the  Restoration,  who,  as  every 
one  knows,  exalted  the  bachelor  at  the  expense  of  the 
married  man.  In  Ann  Veronica,  for  example,  and  The 
New  Machiavelli,  it  is  the  bachelor  who  is  the  cad  and 
the  cornuto;  it  is  the  married  man  who  knows  how  to 
strike  the  emotional  diapason. 

It  may  be  objected  that  it  is  idle  to  promise  a  future 
in  which  a  man  may  love  any  woman  he  pleases,  since 
all  history  teaches  that  a  man  has  his  life-work  cut  out 
for  him  if  he  pleases  any  woman  he  loves.  Mr.  Wells 
does  not  care  what  history  teaches.  It  may  be  pointed 
out  that  experimentation  in  irregular  relations  is  not  a 
novelty;  that  it  is  now,  and  always  has  been,  widely 
practiced ;  and  that  the  experience  of  mankind  has  gen- 
erally proved  it  disastrous.  Mr.  Wells  does  not  care 
what  the  experience  of  mankind  has  proved.  If  you 
assure  him  that  it  is  not  a  question  of  social  "  systems," 
but  of  human  nature,  if  you  insist  that  irregular  rela- 
tions under  any  system  quite  regularly  beget  that  "  vehe- 
ment flame  "  of  jealousy  which  the  wise  man  of  Israel 
says  is  "  cruel  as  the  grave,"  you  do  not  abate  his  en- 
thusiasm one  jot.  He  is  a  man  of  imagination.  He 
makes  his  beliefs  as  he  wants  them.  If  they  clash  with 
immutable  things  in  this  world,  he  creates  another 
world.  He  has  heard  of  jealousy;  but  he  intends  to 
abolish  it.  He  intends  to  create  a  new  society  in  which 
one  can  make  love  to  another  man's  wife  without  excit- 
ing the  jealousy  of  her  husband.  This  is  the  inspirit- 
ing message  of  Passionate  Friends,  which  closes  with 
these  words :  "  I  will  not  be  content  with  that  compro- 
mise of  jealousies  which  is  the  established  life  of  human- 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       63 

ity  today.  I  give  myself — to  the  destruction  of  jealousy 
and  of  the  forms  and  shelters  and  instruments  of 
jealousy,  both  in  my  own  self  and  in  the  thought  and 
laws  and  usage  of  the  world." 

Precisely  Shelley's  idea  when  he  magnanimously  in- 
vited his  wife  to  join  him  and  Mary  Godwin  in  Switzer- 
land. And  she,  poor  wretch,  dumbly  criticized  his  idea 
from  the  bottom  of  the  Serpentine. 

The  defect  in  Wells's  religion  which  distinguishes  it 
from  the  religion  of  Arnold  is  exactly  the  defect  in  his 
morality,  namely,  the  lack  of  any  principle  of  control. 
Here  again,  he  cries,  we  are  in  a  field  for  free  experi- 
mentation ;  nothing  has  been  determined ;  "  religion  and 
philosophy  have  been  impudent  and  quacldsh — quack- 
ish !  "  And  so,  while  for  Arnold  religion  is  something 
which  binds  and  limits,  religion  for  Wells  is  something 
which  looses  and  liberates.  Arnold  rejects  dogmatic 
theology,  but  he  writes  three  books  to  justify  the 
Hebraic  faith  in  an  Eternal,  not  ourselves,  which  makes 
for  righteousness,  and  to  extol  the  "  method  "  and  the 
"  sweet  reasonableness  "  of  Jesus.  Wells  rejects  dog- 
matic theology  and  all  our  inheritance  from  the  Hebrews 
— except  their  turn  for  business  organization;  his  sub- 
stitute for  "  morality  touched  with  emotion  "  is  a  hot 
fit  of  enthusiasm  for  social  progress  excited  by  fixed 
meditation  upon  the  Utopian  projections  of  his  own 
fancy. 

For  Arnold,  the  men  of  true  religious  insight  are 
Jesus,  Marcus  Aurelius,  St.  Francis,  the  author  of  the 
Imitations,  Spinoza,  who  all  consent  together  that  "  the 
Kingdom  of  God  is  within  you."  Wells  designates  this 


64,   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

conception  in  the  case  of  Marcus  Aurelius  as  "  a  desire 
for  a  perfected  inconsequent  egoism."  There  is  some- 
thing to  be  said  for  a  religion  which  produces  a  per- 
fected egoism  like  that  of  Aurelius.  But  Wells,  in  the 
temper  of  Shelley  and  other  social  revolutionists,  insists 
that  "  salvation's  a  collective  thing,"  to  be  accomplished 
somewhere  in  the  social  environment,  beyond  the  borders 
of  the  individual  soul.  The  logical  product  of  the  senti- 
mental altruism  of  Wells  may  be  seen  in  the  hero  of 
almost  any  of  his  later  novels — in  the  hero,  for  example, 
of  Tono-Bungay,  whom  his  creator  quite  accurately 
characterizes  as  a  "  spiritual  guttersnipe  in  love  with 
unimaginable  goddesses." 

With  all  its  fervor  for  perfecting  mankind  in  the 
mass,  the  religion  of  Wells  somehow  fails  to  meet  the 
needs  of  the  individual  man.  It  helps  every  one  but  its 
possessor.  He  has  struggled  with  this  problem,  but  he 
has  not  brought  to  his  task  the  resources  of  the  religious 
sages;  he  has  approached  it  with  only  the  resources  of 
the  scientific  perfectibilians.  He  has  felt,  as  we  all  have 
felt,  the  dumb  and  nameless  pain  which  throbs  at  the 
heart  of  our  being  as  we  march  or  mince  or  creep  or 
crowd  through  the  welter  of  cross-purposes,  wars,  pov- 
erty, dreadful  accidents,  disease,  and  death,  which  we 
call  our  life.  If  you  ask  him  how  to  assuage  that  pain, 
he  answers  that  we  must  apply  scientific  methods  to 
make  mankind  pacific,  intelligent,  well,  and  wealthy.  If 
you  ask  him  why  his  hero,  Trafford  in  Marriage,  who  is 
already  wealthy,  well,  intelligent,  and  pacific,  still  feels 
the  throbbing  pain,  he  replies,  "  That  is  because  Traf- 
ford has  a  developed  social  consciousness,  and  cannot 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       65 

enter  into  felicity  until  there  is  a  like  felicity  for  all 
men  to  enter." 

Now,  did  Mr.  Wells  possess  not  the  insight  of  the 
religious  sages,  but  just  the  sober  human  experience  of 
a  pagan  like  Horace,  he  would  know  that  though  all 
men  entered  his  earthly  paradise  of  lacquered  ceilings, 
white-tiled  bathrooms,  Turkey  rugs,  scientific  kitchens, 
motor-boats,  limousines,  and  Victrolas,  still  in  their  poor 
worm-infested  breasts  would  dwell  "  black  care,"  still 
would  they  remain  spiritual  guttersnipes  in  their  scien- 
tific Elysium.  And  if  Mr.  Wells  consulted  Arnold  or 
the  spiritual  physicians  who  have  effectually  prescribed 
for  the  essential  malady  of  living,  he  would  be  told  that 
inner  serenity  springs  from  self-collection,  self-control, 
and,  above  all,  from  the  Hebraic  sense  of  personal 
righteousness,  which  is  the  beginning  of  religious 
wisdom. 

Here  and  there  through  the  works  of  Wells  there  is  a 
glint  of  skepticism,  a  flash  of  self-mockery,  which  makes 
one  wonder  to  what  extent  he  himself  feels  the  confidence 
of  the  young  people  who  look  to  him  as  their  saviour. 
But  I  have  deliberately  renounced  inquiry  into  the 
essential  sincerity  of  his  radicalism.  I  have  presented 
him  in  the  role  that  captivates  his  admirers,  not  as  an 
empty  resonator  for  a  bewildered  and  discontented 
multitude,  but  as  a  glowing,  eloquent,  sanguine  leader 
of  the  generation  which  is  pressing  for  a  place  in  the 
sun.  I  have  exhibited  him  rising  in  adorable,  unworldly 
innocence  to  arraign  a  social  system  under  which  two 
and  two  make  only  four,  and  water  refuses  to  run  up 
hill,  and  a  child  cannot  eat  his  cake  and  keep  it,  and  fire 


66 

will  not  refrain  from  burning,  nor  the  lion  and  the  lamb 
lie  quietly  together,  nor  sober  people  take  seriously  his 
fairy  tales  of  science,  sex,  and  sociology.  If  my  analysis 
is  correct,  I  have  detached  him  from  Arnold,  and  estab- 
lished his  connection  with  Shelley.  This  service  should 
be  grateful  to  him  and  to  his  followers ;  for  I  have  denied 
him  the  rank  of  a  Victorian  critic  only  that  I  might 
elevate  him  to  the  rank  of  a  Georgian  angel. 

(SINCE  THE  WAB) 

What  transformation  has  the  war  wrought  in  the 
protean  shape  of  Mr.  Wells? 

If  there  is  anything  fixed  in  his  convictions  it  is  his 
belief  that  at  about  the  period  of  his  literary  advent  the 
world  began  to  spin  down  the  ringing  grooves  of  change 
into  an  orderly  and  luminous  future.  As  the  advance 
agent  of  progress  and  the  bosom  friend  of  posterity  he 
was  more  or  less  under  obligation  to  interpret  the  Euro- 
pean upheaval  as  a  stage  in  a  happy  evolutionary  proc- 
ess. Accustomed  to  thinking  on  a  large  scale,  he  at  once 
spread  out  before  him  the  map  of  the  world  and  indulged 
himself  in  his  favorite  recreation  of  prophesying.  In 
his  volume  of  prognostications,  What  Is  Coming? 
(1916)  he  attempted  a  serious  and  realistic  forecast 
based  upon  an  analysis  of  existing  forces  and  tendencies. 
The  war  had  somewhat  shocked  and  embittered  him,  but 
on  the  whole  its  first  effect  was  to  strengthen  his  cheer- 
ful self-confidence.  It  promised,  he  (thought,  to  further 
in  its  own  way  the  political  and  social  changes  which  he 
had  always  regarded  as  necessary  preliminaries  to  the 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       67 

millennium.  The  responsibility  for  the  debacle — and 
thus  for  the  forward  lunge  of  civilization — he  placed  to 
the  credit  of  the  militaristic  misrulers  and  the  "  culti- 
vated rancid  nationalism  "  of  Germany.  He  saw  the 
possibility  of  a  permanent  settlement  of  Europe  in  the 
overthrow  of  the  Hohenzollern  Empire.  Since  in  the 
present  style  of  warfare  a  decisive  and  shattering  vic- 
tory was  not  to  be  expected,  he  declared  that  the  reduc- 
tion of  the  Central  Powers  must  be  continued,  after  arms 
were  laid  down,  by  an  economic  alliance.  This  program 
would  necessitate  the  retention  and  the  extension  of  the 
present  strong  governmental  control  of  industries,  com- 
merce, and  transportation.  The  Central  Powers  would 
be  obliged  to  adopt  similar  measures,  and  a  third  great 
alliance  of  the  Americas  was  fairly  predictable.  Among 
these  three  great  groups  of  nations  tremendous  conflicts 
would  ensue.  Yet  in  these  grand  divisions  questions  of 
race,  nationality,  and  sovereignty  would  inevitably  lose 
their  exacerbating  acuteness.  The  way  would  be  gradu- 
ally cleared  for  the  federation  and  socialization  of  the 
nations  and  the  scientific  world-state,  which  has  always 
floated  like  a  beautiful  mirage  on  the  far  horizon  of  Mr. 
Wells's  soul.  The  hopes  of  humanity  thus  depended,  as 
Mr.  Wells  felt  in  the  earlier  stages  of  the  war,  upon 
vast  political  and  social  alterations,  dictated  by  military 
necessity,  imposed  by  military  force,  and  equivalent  in 
their  total  effect  to  what  a  neutral  observer  might  have 
called  the  "  Germanization  "  of  the  world. 

Desperate  Liberals  on  every  hand  have  said :  "  We 
must  fight  fire  with  fire.  We  abhor  the  spirit  of  modern 
Germany;  but  in  order  to  defeat  Germany  we  must 


68   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

temporarily  imitate  Germany."  Mr.  Wells,  however, 
desired  the  defeat  of  the  Germans  and  at  the  same  time 
the  permanent  and  universal  triumph  of  German  organ- 
ization. It  had  been  his  constant  day-dream  to  get 
Humanity  into  the  Promised  Land  en  masse,  and  not 
ten  thousand  years  hence,  but  swiftly,  soon,  in  the  next 
fifty  years,  in  the  next  decade,  soon  enough  to  permit 
his  writing  a  novel  entitled  "  Beyond  Jordan."  Human- 
ity apathetically  dillydallied  in  the  wilderness.  Human- 
ity refused  to  march  sweetly  and  smoothly  and  moved 
as  by  one  common  thought — and  that  Mr.  Wells's.  The 
war  revealed  to  him  the  methods  of  "  reformers  "  who 
get  results.  Snatching  at  military  necessity  as  an 
obviously  effective  goad  to  indolent  and  divers-minded 
men,  he  grasped  at  last  the  missing  essential  in  a  scien- 
tific socialist  Utopia — a  coercive  force. 

He  and  other  honest  men  maintain  that  military  coer- 
cion is  a  temporary  expedient  and  that  Germany  is  a 
needlessly  imperfect  model.  He  reassuringly  declares 
that  the  Kaiser  and  the  Prussian  oligarchy  and  the 
German  army  are  curious  archaisms,  unnecessary  and 
removable  excrescences  upon  the  "  modern  scientific 
State."  But  this,  I  think,  is  one  of  the  great  contem- 
porary illusions.  Army,  oligarchy,  and  Kaiser,  or  their 
equivalents,  are  the  causes  and  conditions  of  such  a 
state — are  the  indispensable  clubs  of  cooperation  and 
efficiency  and  impassioned  concerted  mass  action.  It  is 
idle  to  point  to  the  accomplishment  of  "  democratic  " 
England  so  long  as  England  is  at  war,  for  England  has 
to  all  intents  and  purposes  temporarily  abandoned  de- 
mocracy. Government  in  war-time  is,  if  effective,  gov- 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       69 

ernment  while  the  people  hold  their  breath,  government 
under  artificial  conditions  maintained  by  a  quite  abnor- 
mal and,  in  the  long  run,  unendurable  surrender  of  indi- 
vidual liberty,  will,  property,  and  life.  When  the  ob- 
jects of  existence  are  simplified  by  the  extraordinary 
stress  of  a  great  war  to  the  production  of  munitions, 
provisions,  and  transportation,  the  obvious  demand  is 
for  expert  governmental  control;  the  cry  goes  up  for  a 
"  dictator."  The  moment  peace  is  made  and  the  nor- 
mal diversity  and  multiplicity  of  individual  human  inter- 
ests are  again  free  to  assert  themselves,  democrats  will 
recall  to  secure  what  rights  governments  are  instituted 
among  men.  John  Smith  will  inquire  again  in  his  old 
skeptical  democratic  fashion  where  is  the  government 
official  who  is  more  expert  than  John  Smith  in  managing 
his  own  life  and  liberty  and  in  directing  his  own  pursuit 
of  happiness.  The  temporary  unity  and  solidarity  of 
the  volonte  generale  will  disappear.  The  will  of  the 
governors  will  lose  its  identity  with  the  will  of  the  gov- 
erned. Only  an  iron  fist  will  be  able  to  buffet  them 
out  of  the  "  rotten  "  individualism  which  distinguishes  a 
true  democracy  from  a  military  autocracy. 

"  We  are  beginning  to  agree,"  says  Mr.  Wells,  "  that 
reasonably  any  man  may  be  asked  to  die  for  his  country ; 
what  we  have  to  recognize  is  that  any  man's  proprietor- 
ship, interests,  claims,  or  rights  may  just  as  properly 
be  called  upon  to  die."  Our  prophet  counts  heavily 
upon  the  immense  burden  of  the  war  debt  and  the 
trained  sacrificial  spirit  of  the  soldiers  returning  to  civil 
life  to  strengthen  and  continue  in  the  years  of  peace  this 
readiness  to  surrender  all  to  the  State.  Under  dire 


70   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

necessity  the  mood  may  persist  in  some  degree  through 
the  period  of  reconstruction ;  and  we  shall  hear  eloquent 
and  heroic-sounding  voices  urging  us  to  despise  the 
individual  and  to  glorify  the  national  life.  Yet  we  may 
certainly  reckon  on  a  powerful  reaction  after  the  war 
against  the  abstract  idealism  and  the  concrete  brutality 
of  "  politically-minded  men."  Times  like  these  in  which 
we  are  living  may  hear  with  little  show  of  horror  the 
Napoleonic  question,  "  What  are  a  million  lives  to  a 
man  like  me  ?  "  or — to  modernize  the  query — "  What 
are  the  lives  of  all  your  sons  in  comparison  with  the  per- 
petuity of  the  State  ?  "  But  human  nature  will  return 
to  its  deep-seated  belief  in  certain  inalienable  individual 
human  rights ;  and  millions  of  young  men  in  Europe 
who  are  doomed  to  go  maimed  and  stumping  through 
their  prime  will  soon  be  looking  a  little  wistfully  about 
to  discover  whether  there  is  any  land  left  in  the  world 
where  a  man  may  live  and  let  live.  In  the  moment  that 
the  all-sanctifying  military  necessity  relaxes,  some  at 
least  of  the  "  moral "  qualities  which,  in  the  stress  of 
war,  governments  stamp  with  the  highest  values  will  be 
popularly  rated  like  Confederate  "  shinplasters  " ;  and 
plain  people,  chafing  under  orders  to  march  in  directions 
which  they  have  not  determined,  will  be  praying  again 
to  the  shiftless  and  inefficient  gods  of  the  Victorians  to 
preserve  them  from  too  much  government. 

Mr.  Britling  Sees  It  Through  owes  its  success  in  this 
country  largely  to  the  fact  that  Mr.  Wells  reacts  in  it 
against  his  own  prophecies  of  the  salvation  of  the  world 
by  military  force,  economic  necessity,  and  the  alteration 
of  the  map.  The  prophetic  book  was  a  typical  product 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       71 

of  his  speculative  reason,  influenced  by  the  current  exal- 
tation of  mechanical  efficiency,  and  reiterating  in  great 
part  his  earlier  prophecies.  The  novel  was  the  result 
of  his  actual  experiences  in  a  war  waged  by  a  mechani- 
cally efficient  nation  against  its  more  or  less  inefficient 
neighbors.  In  the  first  shock  of  the  conflict  Mr.  Britling 
of  course  cries  out :  "  Oh  why,  my  fellow-Britons,  did 
you  not  render  yourselves  mechanically  efficient  as 
Rudyard  Kipling,  and  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells,  and  other 
foresighted  gentlemen  long  ago  urged  you  to  do."  But 
as  the  war  goes  on  Mr.  Britling  enters  upon  grave 
reconsiderations.  The  central  interest  of  the  book  is 
in  its  exhibition  of  something  like  spiritual  commotion, 
in  the  midst  of  which  there  appear  profound  doubts  of 
naturalistic  morality  and  mechanical  efficiency,  our  mod- 
ern instrument  of  salvation. 

The  masterpiece  is  of  course  Mr.  Britling,  who  is 
transparently  Mr.  Wells  himself,  portrayed  with  un- 
precedented frankness.  Most  of  his  important  portrait - 
painting  is  done  from  the  same  model,  but  his  practiced 
hand  has  never  before  produced  so  engaging  a  likeness 
of  himself.  I  am  not  speaking  of  his  private  life,  of 
which  I  know  nothing,  but  of  his  ideas,  his  sympathies, 
his  character  as  a  man  of  letters.  What  one  enjoys  in 
Mr.  Wells  is  his  curiosity,  his  vivacity,  his  hopefulness, 
his  bright  eagerness  to  clasp  the  wide  universe  in  one 
heart-satisfying  embrace.  What  one  deplores  in  him  is 
his  hodgepodge  of  sex  and  politics,  his  passion  for 
chimeras,  his  habit  of  supping  on  the  east  wind,  his 
unwillingness  to  grow  up  at  last  and  cheerfully  adjust 
himself  to  the  generally  recognized  fact  that  there  is 


72   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

no  pot  of  gold  at  the  end  of  the  rainbow.  Aspiring, 
visionary,  and  diffuse,  he  makes  himself  adored  by  radi- 
cals of  one-and-twenty  and  by  middle-aged  women  with 
imaginations  unappeased  by  experience.  But  he  dis- 
appoints those  who  expect  an  intellectual  leader  to  find 
his  own  center,  make  up  his  mind,  and  come  to  conclu- 
sions. TO  those  who  look  for  fruit  in  the  fall  of  the 
year  he  offers  a  new  crop  of  blossoms.  He  has  made  a 
god  of  "  becoming."  His  intellectual  fluency  and  ver- 
satility have  been  his  undoing,  giving  him  ever  the 
appearance  of  an  unstable,  an  unformed  power,  a  nebu- 
lous nucleus  of  dissolving  impulses.  Mr.  Chesterton 
once  remarked  that  one  can  hear  Mr.  Wells  growing 
overnight.  The  war  has  been  a  long  and  a  formative 
night,  and  Mr.  Wells  has  come  out  of  it  with  one  book 
which  can  stand  the  light  of  common  day.  The  fact  is, 
apparently,  that  he  has  at  last,  to  borrow  his  own 
figure,  "  felt  in  his  skin  "  what  he  has  only  been  dream- 
ing about  for  the  last  quarter  of  a  century.  He  has  felt 
in  his  skin  what  is  wrong  with  the  world. 

The  effect  of  futility  in  a  great  many  of  his  novels 
is  directly  traceable  to  his  endeavor  to  persuade  us  that 
something  which  is  in  fact  of  very  little  importance  is 
of  very  great  importance.  I  refer  to  the  philanderings 
of  his  fervent  heroes  and  heroines.  In  order  that  some 
fervent  hero  or  heroine  might  philander  for  six  months 
or  a  year,  and  philander  in  tranquillity,  he  has  repeat- 
edly tried  to  persuade  us  that  human  nature  should  be 
altered  and  the  world  reconstructed.  Now,  the  world 
needs  reconstitution,  and  human  nature  needs  altera- 
tion ;  but  not  for  that  purpose.  It  was  difficult,  indeed, 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       73 

to  believe  that  a  man  with  Mr.  Wells's  wholesome  comic 
sense  could  seriously  weigh  or  consider  that  purpose; 
or  fail  to  see  the  absurdity  of  clamoring  for  order, 
measure,  and  control  in  the  external  world  while  reserv- 
ing a  silly,  sentimental,  yet  tremendously  destructive 
anarchy  in  the  heart.  It  was  almost  necessary  to  believe 
that  in  employing  the  bait  used  by  the  lower  order  of 
socialists  he  was  inspired  less  by  a  desire  to  reform  the 
world  than  by  a  desire  to  make  his  trap  irresistibly 
captivating  to  unappeased  middle-aged  women  and  radi- 
cals of  one-and-twenty. 

Well,  in  this  respect  the  great  war,  with  its  multi- 
tudinous public  and  private  calamities  pressing  daily 
nearer  to  the  heart  of  the  household  at  Matchings  Easy, 
provokes  in  Mr.  Britling  a  revulsion  of  feeling.  Through 
the  first  selfish  panic  of  the  civil  population  hoarding 
their  gold  and  buying  up  bread  and  tinned  sardines; 
through  the  days  when  one  watched  with  growing  aston- 
ishment, yet  with  an  aloof  spectatorial  air,  the  thunder- 
ous trampling  and  rush  of  the  Germans  toward  Paris ; 
through  the  period  of  agitated  unpreparedness  and  the 
apathetic  recruiting  and  the  drilling  without  uniforms 
or  rifles ;  through  the  Churchill-excursions  to  Constanti- 
nople; through  the  tedious  wintry  sieges;  through  the 
months  when  the  villages  of  England  filled  with  Belgian 
exiles  and  with  wounded  sons  and  with  English  widows 
and  orphans,  sleeping  and  shuddering  under  the  peril 
of  infested  skies — through  all  this  commotion  the  dis- 
tinguished speculative  author,  Mr.  Britling,  settles 
slowly  earthwards  till  his  feet  are  planted  upon  the 
"  realities  of  life."  Incidentally  his  eighth  affair  of  the 


74.   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

heart,  which  in  the  piping  times  of  peace  would  have 
required  to  be  elaborated  into  one  of  his  soulful  ro- 
mances, sinks  into  exactly  the  place  of  contemptible 
insignificance  which  it  deserves. 

With  a  new  sense  of  values  Mr.  Wells  turns  upon 
himself,  in  the  person  of  Mr.  Britling,  and  humorously 
analyzes  that  fascinating  romantic  temperament  to 
which  in  his  previous  novels  he  has  been  so  indulgent: 

The  mysterious  processes  of  nature  that  had  produced 
Mr.  Britling  had  implanted  in  him  an  obstinate  persuasion 
that  somewhere  in  the  world,  from  some  human  being,  it 
was  still  possible  to  find  the  utmost  satisfaction  for  every 
need  and  craving.  He  could  imagine,  as  waiting  for  him, 
he  knew  not  where,  a  completeness  of  understanding,  a  per- 
fection of  response,  that  would  reach  all  the  gamut  of  his 
feelings  and  sensations  from  the  most  poetical  to  the  most 
entirely  physical,  a  beauty  of  relationship  so  transfiguring 
that  not  only  would  she — it  went  without  saying  that  this 
completion  was  a  woman — be  perfectly  beautiful  in  its 
light,  but  what  was  manifestly  incredible,  that  he  too  would 
be  perfectly  beautiful  and  quite  at  ease. 

There  is  what  I  have  called  the  unrealistic  and 
Shelleyan  emotional  tendency  in  the  prophet  of  the 
Younger  Generation.  Now  hear  Mr.  Wells's  realistic 
and  disillusioning  comment  upon  that  tendency: 

This  persuasion  is  as  foolish  as  though  a  camel  hoped 
that  some  day  it  would  drink  from  such  a  spring  that  it 
would  never  thirst  again.  For  the  most  part  Mr.  Britling 
ignored  its  presence  in  his  mind,  and  resisted  the  impulses 
it  started.  But  at  odd  times,  and  more  particularly  in  the 
afternoon  and  while  traveling  and  in  between  books  [fairly 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       75 

often  by  this  account]  Mr.  Britling  so  far  succumbed  to 
this  strange  expectation  of  a  wonder  round  the  corner  that 
he  slipped  the  anchor  of  his  humor  and  self-contempt  and 
joined  the  great  cruising  brotherhood  of  the  Pilgrims  of 
Love.  .  .  . 

For  some  years  the  suspicion  had  been  growing  in  Mr. 
Britling's  mind  that  in  planting  this  persuasion  in  his  being, 
the  mysterious  processes  of  Nature  had  been,  perhaps  for 
some  purely  biological  purpose,  pulling,  as  people  say,  his 
leg;  that  there  were  not  these  perfect  responses,  that  loving 
a  woman  is  a  thing  one  does  thoroughly  once  for  all — or 
so —  and  afterwards  recalls  regretfully  in  a  series  of  vain 
repetitions,  and  that  the  career  of  a  Pilgrim  of  Love,  so 
soon  as  you  strip  off  its  undulous  glamor,  is  either  the  most 
pitiful  or  the  most  vulgar  and  vile  of  perversions  from  the 
proper  conduct  of  life. 

What  does  all  this  mean  but  that  Mr.  Wells  is  relax- 
ing his  hold  upon  his  grand  elementary  moral  concep- 
tion of  life  as  a  "  tissue  of  births."  As  a  Utopian 
naturalist  he  had  advocated  the  harmonization  of  con- 
science with  what  he  now  almost  contemptuously  desig- 
nates as  Nature's  "  purely  biological  purpose."  He 
now  implicitly  recognizes  human  purposes  which  prop- 
erly run  counter  to  the  biological  purpose,  and  human 
ideals  which  properly  oppose  the  mysterious  instincts 
conspiring  to  pull,  as  people  say,  one's  leg.  Mr.  Wells 
has  been  guilty  here  of  another  betrayal  of  the  Younger 
Generation.  He  threatens  to  lead  the  young  people  back 
into  the  abandoned  region  of  "  abstract,  refined,  and 
intellectualized  ideas  " — such  ideas  as  right,  liberty, 
happiness,  duty,  and  beauty,  in  behalf  of  which,  indeed, 
they  are  now  shedding  their  blood. 


76       ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

It  may  be  objected  that  the  quasi-official  philosophy 
of  modern  Germany  fortifies  its  warriors  without  resort 
to  the  old  moral  abstractions.  It  gets  the  fighting  vir- 
tues by  sternly  inculcating  the  subordination  of  personal 
instincts  to  the  imperious  needs  of  the  species.  It  has 
heard  Nature  murmuring  to  herself  in  the  still  watches 
of  the  night  "  Deutschland  uber  alles"  and  it  has  reso- 
lutely harmonized  conscience  with  the  Great  Mother's 
biological  purpose,  her  mysterious  passion  for  the  segre- 
gation, triumph,  and  perpetuity  of  the  German  race. 
At  some  time  in  the  course  of  the  war,  one  conjectures,  it 
must  have  rushed  upon  Mr.  Wells  with  a  shock  that  the 
German  "  morality  "  is  Wellsian  theory  adapted  to  cir- 
cumstances by  practical  men,  that  German  efficiency  is 
the  realization  of  his  life-long  dreams,  that  modern 
Germany  is,  in  short  the  naturalistic  Wellsian  Utopia 
militant.  It  must  have  occurred  to  him  with  horrible 
searchings  of  the  heart  that  there  at  last  at  his  door, 
effectively  operating,  was  the  machinery  for  "  railroad- 
ing "  mankind  into  the  scientific  millennium.  Why  should 
he  seek  to  destroy  it?  Because  it  was  not  English? 
That  doubtless  was  the  cause  of  his  first  instinctive 
gesture  of  wrath  and  indignation.  He  had  accustomed 
himself  to  thinking  of  the  road  into  the  Promised  Land 
as  built  and  operated  by  Englishmen.  Accordingly  he 
joined  in  the  popular  clamor,  which  may  be  summarized 
as  follows :  "  The  German  machine  is  the  best  ever 
devised.  Therefore  we  must  utterly  destroy  it.  And 
we  must  build  one  of  our  own  exactly  like  it.  The  Ger- 
mans are  scoundrels.  We  are  honest  men."  Into  this 
logic  of  jealousy  Mr.  Wells  was  plunged  bjr  the  fact 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       77 

that  he  and  the  Germans  worshiped  the  same  gods,  and 
founded  their  "  morality  "  upon  the  same  naturalistic 
principles.  Had  he  not  in  The  Discovery  of  the  Future 
scoffed  at  the  legal  type  of  mind  which  reveres  the  past, 
stands  upon  promises,  abides  by  treaties,  and  quibbles 
about  who  began  the  fighting?  Had  he  not  glorified  the 
"  creative  mind  "  with  visions  of  empire,  with  the  "  will 
to  live,"  jesuitically  making  morality  a  means  to  its 
end,  boldly  trampling  over  prohibitions  to  its  goal, 
cheerily  letting  the  dead  past  bury  its  dead  ?  How  could 
he  distinguish  his  attitude  of  mind  from  that  of  the  alien 
enemy  ?  Only  by  abandoning  his  "  atheistical "  follow- 
ers, renouncing  his  worship  of  machinery,  and  shifting 
his  moral  center. 

On  the  publication  of  Mr.  Britling  it  was  widely 
heralded  through  the  press  that  Mr.  Wells  had  "  discov- 
ered God."  It  would  have  been  more  accurate  to  say 
that  Mr.  Wells  was  fumbling  for  God.  He  was  reach- 
ing out,  with  manifest  symptoms  of  spiritual  dis- 
tress, for  a  power  apart  from  the  brutal  rush  and  con- 
flict of  natural  forces.  He  brought  in  an  incoher- 
ent report  of  a  vague  spiritual  reality  mistily  en- 
compassing the  field  "  where  ignorant  armies  clash  by 
night." 

The  "  inwardness  "  of  Mr.  Wells's  reaction  to  the  war 
after  his  "  discovery  of  God  "  may  perhaps  be  suggested 
by  the  words  which  come  into  Mr.  Britling's  mind  as  he 
stands  on  the  scene  of  a  Zeppelin  raid  : 

Some  train  of  subconscious  suggestion  brought  a  long  for- 
gotten speech  back  into  Mr.  Britling's  mind,  a  speech  that 
w  full  of  that  light  which  still  seeks  so  mysteriously  and 


78   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

indefatigably  to  break  through  the  darkness  and  thickness 
of  the  human  mind. 

He  whispered  the  words.  No  unfamiliar  words  could 
have  the  same  effect  of  comfort  and  conviction. 

He  whispered  it  of  those  men  whom  he  still  imagined 
flying  far  away  there  eastward,  through  the  clear  freezing 
air  beneath  the  stars,  those  muffled  sailors  and  engineers 
who  had  caused  so  much  pain  and  agony  in  this  little  town. 

"  Father,  forgive  them,  for  they  know  not  what  they  do." 

Is  this  hypocrisy  and  an  insufferable  literary  pose  on 
the  part  of  Mr.  Britling?  Or  is  it  just  as  sincere  as  his 
son's  "  Damn  the  Kaiser — and  all  fools  "?  One  accepts 
its  sincerity.  For  Mr.  Britling  has  been  taking  medi- 
cine, bitter  and  purgative,  to  his  soul's  great  good.  He 
has  brought  "  the  Zeppelin  raids,  with  their  slow  cres- 
cendo of  blood-stained  futility,"  into  connection  with 
"  the  same  kind  of  experience  that  our  ships  have  in- 
flicted scores  of  times  in  the  past  upon  innocent  people 
in  the  villages  of  Africa  and  Polynesia."  These  terrible 
incursions  were  a  part  of  that  mechanical  "  efficiency  " 
which  the  Germans  had  and  the  English  had  not,  but 
which  Mr.  Wells  and  other  imperially-minded  men  had 
long  been  urging  upon  the  English  as  the  way  of  salva- 
tion. It  was  not  the  way!  That  was  the  truth  glim- 
mering in  Mr.  Britling's  mind.  It  was  the  way  to  some- 
thing— perhaps  to  more  efficiency,  but  not  to  salvation. 
That  lay  at  the  end  of  a  route  which  the  footsteps  of 
the  imperial  dream  have  never  trod.  It  lay  perhaps 
somewhere  in  the  valley  of  self-humiliation  beyond  the 
range  of  those  who  put  their  trust  in  the  legs  of  man  or 
in  chariots  and  horses.  Mr.  Britling  took  his  first  step 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       79 

toward  it  by  honestly  "  no  longer  thinking  of  the  Ger- 
mans as  diabolical.  They  were  human ;  they  had  a  case. 
It  was  a  stupid  case,  but  our  case,  too,  was  a  stupid 
case.  How  stupid  were  all  our  cases !  What  was  it  we 
missed?  Something,  he  felt,  very  close  to  us,  and  very 
elusive.  Something  that  would  resolve  a  hundred 
tangled  oppositions." 

Mr.  Wells  and  Mr.  Britling  have  written  in  the  course 
of  the  war  a  good  many  pamphlets  on  what  should  be 
done  after  it.  Mr.  Britling  criticizes  his  contributions 
thus: 

"  Dissertations/'  said  Mr.  Britling. 

Never  had  it  been  so  plain  to  Mr.  Britling  that  he  was  a 
weak,  silly,  ill-informed,  and  hasty-minded  writer,  and 
never  had  he  felt  so  invincible  a  conviction  that  the  Spirit 
of  God  was  in  him,  and  that  it  fell  to  him  to  take  some  part 
in  the  establishment  of  a  new  order  upon  the  earth ;  it  might 
be  the  most  trivial  part  by  the  scale  of  the  task,  but  for  him 
it  was  to  be  now  his  supreme  concern. 

The  criticism  in  this  paragraph  was  severe  but  not 
wholly  undeserved,  and  the  promise  of  amendment  which 
it  offered  was  illusory,  as  Mr.  Wells  promptly  demon- 
strated by  the  publication  of  God  The  Invisible  King,  a 
book  as  hasty  and  ill-informed  as  anything  that  he  has 
written.  Apparently  he  was  elated  by  the  impression 
made  upon  his  readers  by  Mr.  Britling's  religious  ex- 
periences but  mistaken  about  the  nature  of  the  impres- 
sion. Mr.  Britling  Sees  It  Through  was  an  arresting 
social  phenomenon.  "  Mark,"  one  said  to  oneself,  "  this 
interesting  indication  of  the  law  of  man's  spirit.  In 


80   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

the  hour  of  overwhelming  trial  and  bewildering  disas- 
ters he  gropes  instinctively  for  a  rock  of  refuge,  for  the 
permanent  amid  the  transitory,  for  the  eternal  which 
we  call  God.  So  pervasive  is  the  present  sense  of  need 
that  it  takes  hold  upon  the  mind  even  of  H.  G.  Wells, 
who  probably  knows  less  of  the  nature  of  God  than  any 
author  of  his  eminence  now  living."  Such  was  our  im- 
pression of  his  conversion.  But  Mr.  Wells,  hearing  the 
wide  murmur  of  interest  in  the  one  "  naturalist "  that 
had  repented,  leaped  to  the  conclusion  that  he,  single- 
handed,  had  made  a  great  light  break  upon  a  world  wait- 
ing in  outer  darkness  for  his  private  illumination.  Far 
from  admitting  that  he  has  returned  to  the  "  fold,"  he 
naively  lifts  up  his  voice  and  invites  the  fold  to  turn  to 
him.  There  is  not  a  grain  of  humility  in  this  new 
apostle.  Standing  in  the  midst  of  Mars'  Hill  he  radi- 
antly offers  us  a  copy  of  his  new  book,  saying  in  effect : 
"  Whom  therefore  ye  ignorantly  worship,  him  declare 
I  unto  you." 

There  is  unquestionably  an  abundance  of  magnani- 
mous impulse  in  God  The  In-visible  King,  and  its  pres- 
ence tempts  the  benevolent  critic  to  exclaim,  "  Let  the 
devil  fly  away  with  its  faults."  But  Mr.  Wells  himself 
teaches  us  no  such  critical  forbearance.  Every  time 
that  he  writes  a  book  he  condemns  all  his  predecessors. 
His  occasional  tributes  to  other  men  go  to  his  contem- 
poraries. And  each  new  message  of  his  cancels  his 
previous  messages.  He  has  no  base  of  supplies;  he 
keeps  open  no  line  of  communication  with  the  past.  He 
is  still  the  grandiose  and  romantic  dreamer  bent  upon 
bringing  forward  a  brand-new  scheme  for  the  salvation 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       81 

of  the  world.  A  few  years  ago  it  was  world-socialism; 
a  little  later  it  was  world-aristocracy ;  today  it  is  world- 
theocracy.  What  it  will  be  tomorrow  no  man  knows, 
but  every  man  can  guess  that  it  will  be  something  differ- 
ent and  equally  evanescent.  Every  reflecting  man  can 
guess  this,  because  the  problem  which  Mr.  Wells  sets 
himself  is  insoluble  to  the  point  of  absurdity,  namely, 
the  establishment  of  a  government  of  the  world  by  anar- 
chists. Like  all  men  of  anarchical  temper,  he  constantly 
oscillates  between  absolute  despotism  and  absolute  lib- 
erty, and  never  stops  at  the  point  of  rest  between  the 
extremes.  The  problem  presented  in  God  The  Invisible 
King  is  precisely :  How  to  bring  about  "  the  kingdom 
of  God  on  earth  "  by  complete  and  universal  anarchy 
in  religion.  I  have  misstated  the  case.  Every  anarchist 
is  by  nature  a  despot.  Mr.  Wells's  anarchy  is  not  to 
be  quite  complete  and  universal.  "  Had  I  the  plantation 
of  this  isle,"  says  old  Gonzalo  in  The  Tempest,  "  and 
were  the  king  on't,  I  would  by  contraries  execute  all 
things,"  and  a  little  later  he  adds  that  on  the  island 
there  should  be  no  sovereignty.  The  end  of  his  speech, 
as  a  bystander  remarks,  forgets  its  beginning.  Mr. 
Wells's  anarchy,  like  the  amiable  Gonzalo's,  is  qualified 
by  the  absolute  despotism  of  its  would-be  creator.  In 
the  "  kingdom  of  God  on  earth  "  he  very  firmly  rules 
that  there  shall  be  no  churches,  no  priests,  no  Bibles, 
no  creeds ;  and  happy  is  the  man  cuius  oblectatio  est  in 
lege  H.  G.  Wells,  et  qui  de  lege  Ulius  meditatur  interdiu 
ac  noctu. 

Compared  with  Mr.  Wells,  the  Reverend  Billy  Sunday 
walks  humbly  and  reverently  before  God  and  the  history 


82   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

of  human  experience.  Billy  Sunday,  knowing  that  re- 
ligion is  what  binds  us  to  righteousness,  seeks  to  fill  the 
emotions  with  love  and  fear  of  God  and  hatred  and  fear 
of  the  devil  in  order  to  bind  his  hearers  to  the  ten  major 
laws  delivered  by  Moses.  His  religion  is  founded  upon 
a  rock,  which  he  does  not  imagine  is  of  his  discovery  or 
invention.  Mr.  Wells  has  invented  his  God,  but  he  has 
not  yet  invented  his  righteousness;  and  that  singular 
omission  leaves  his  deity  out  of  all  characteristic  employ- 
ment. He  does  not  even  pretend  to  know  what  right- 
eousness is.  Furthermore  he  profoundly  objects  to 
being  bound  by  anything.  Accordingly  he  makes  a  clean 
sweep  of  all  religious  authorities  and  all  scriptures 
which,  as  "  revealed  "  truth  or  as  potent  poetical  symbol, 
have  proved  through  generation  after  generation  their 
regulative  efficiency  in  human  affairs.  In  their  stead  he 
offers  his  sketch  of  the  Invisible  Kin^  made  in  his  own 
image  early  in  1917 — a  Utopian  enthusiast  whose  func- 
tion is  not  to  bind  and  regulate  but  to  fling  the  reins 
on  the  neck  of  enthusiasm.  The  Invisible  King  is  no 
meddler,  like  the  God  of  the  Hebrews,  in  a  man's  private 
affairs :  "  We  have  to  follow  our  reason  as  our  sole 
guide  in  our  individual  treatment  of  all  such  things  as 
food,  and  health,  and  sex."  Mr.  Wells  modifies  this 
principle  in  another  place  by  telling  us  that  when  in 
doubt  about  some  nice  point  of  conduct  we  may  consult 
our  family  physician;  and  this  permission  or  advice 
seems  justified  by  the  fact  that  "  our  spiritual  nature 
follows  our  bodily  as  a  glove  follows  the  hand."  Souls 
craving  more  light  are  recommended  to  consult  the 
author's  First  and  Last  Things.  If  by  chance  any 


UTOPIAN  NATURALISM  OF  WELLS       83 

apostle  of  the  new  faith  insists  upon  having  a  back- 
ground for  his  religion,  let  him  turn  to  the  Koran  rather 
than  to  the  Bible.  The  Koran  is  a  better  source;  for 
"  Islam  was  never  saddled  with  a  creed." 

As  Mr.  Wells  warms  to  his  task  of  composition,  the 
spirit  of  prophesy  descends  upon  him,  and  he  begins 
to  declare  what  things  this  churchless,  creedless,  lawless 
faith  is  going  to  accomplish  in  the  world.  The  tangle 
of  contradictions  into  which  he  falls  is  amusing.  "  We 
of  the  new  faith  "  reject  Christ  because  he  was  only  "  a 
saint  of  non-resistance."  And  yet,  continues  our  angelic 
doctor  gravely,  "  there  is  a  curious  modernity  about 
very  many  of  Christ's  recorded  sayings."  "  Our  faith," 
however,  as  distinguished  from  Christianity  is  militant. 
Apparently  "  we  "  have  conceived  the  quite  novel  idea  of 
redeeming  the  world  from  sin  by  the  effusion  of  blood ! 
Ours  is  a  militant  faith ;  yet  it  is  absolutely  unorganized : 
"  it  is  for  each  man  to  follow  his  own  impulse,  and  to 
speak  to  his  like  in  his  own  fashion."  The  intelligent 
reader  will  at  once  perceive  what  an  advantage  that 
gives  "  us  "  over,  let  us  say,  Catholic  Christendom.  Our 
faith  is  unorganized ;  "  and  yet  " — here,  I  submit,  Mr. 
Wells's  trust  in  religious  anarchy  touches  the  cloudy 
borders  of  sublimity — "  and  yet  in  a  few  score  years  the 
faith  of  the  true  God  will  be  spreading  about  the  world. 
The  few  halting  confessions  of  God  that  one  hears  here 
and  there  today,  like  that  little  twittering  of  birds  which 
comes  before  the  dawn,  will  have  swollen  to  a  choral 
harmony." 

The  fine  and  sound  things  in  this  book  I  have  not 
much  emphasized.  They  are  exhortations  to  "  repent- 


84.   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

ance,"  "  consecration,"  "  self-sacrifice,"  labor  for  the 
"  kingdom  of  God  on  earth."  Mr.  Wells's  impression 
that  they  are  new  is  as  "  curious  "  as  the  "  modernity  of 
very  many  of  Christ's  recorded  sayings."  They  may 
of  course  be  heard  in  any  orthodox  pulpit  in  the  course 
of  a  month's  sermons — with  due  credit  given  for  their 
origination  and  some  attempt  made  to  render  their 
meaning  definite  and  their  application  practical.  As 
Mr.  Wells  handles  them  they  tend  only  to  create  a  vague 
diffusive  emotion.  It  is  better  for  him  to  think  of  them 
as  of  his  own  confection  than  for  him  not  to  think  of 
them  at  all ;  but  as  a  matter  of  fact  the  chief  contribu- 
tive  element  in  his  testament  is  his  peculiarly  sanguine 
and  mellifluous  egotism.  If  he  could  only  bring  himself 
to  acknowledge  now  and  then  that  ideas  may  be  true  and 
useful  even  though  they  have  always  been  recognized 
as  such,  he  might  occasionally  find  the  whole  force  of 
ancient  traditions  gathering  behind  him  and  supporting 
his  advance  into  the  future.  His  passion  for  dynamit- 
ing his  own  rear  and  sallying  out  on  that  long  march 
with  only  his  "  personal  luggage  "  betokens  not  an  in- 
tellectual leader  but  an  intellectual  madcap.  It  is  a  fine 
feather  in  the  bonnet  of  a  writer  of  naturalistic  fiction 
to  create  and  bring  out  between  novels  a  perfectly  new 
divinity,  and  one  so  amiable  as  the  Invisible  King.  But 
I,  for  one,  find  that  his  prophecy  of  the  kingdom  of  this 
pleasant  Utopian  has  only  given  me  a  particular  relish 
for  rereading  the  ninetieth  and  the  ninety-first  Psalms. 


ni 

THE  BARBARIC  NATURALISM  OF 
THEODORE  DREISER 

THE  layman  who  listens  reverently  to  the  reviewers 
discussing  the  new  novels  and  to  the  novelists  discussing 
themselves  can  hardly  escape  persuasion  that  a  great 
change  has  rather  recently  taken  place  in  the  spirit  of 
the  age,  in  the  literature  which  reflects  it,  and  in  the 
criticism  which  judges  it.  The  nature  of  the  supposed 
revolution  may  be  briefly  summarized. 

The  elder  generation  was  in  love  with  illusions,  and 
looked  at  truth  through  a  glass  darkly  and  timorously. 
The  artist,  tongue-tied  by  authority  and  trammeled  by 
aesthetic  and  moral  conventions,  selected,  suppressed, 
and  rearranged  the  data  of  experience  and  observation. 
The  critic,  "  morally  subsidized,"  regularly  professed 
his  disdain  for  a  work  of  art  in  which  no  light  glim- 
mered above  "  the  good  and  the  beautiful." 

The  present  age  is  fearless  and  is  freeing  itself  from 
illusions.  Now,  for  the  first  time  in  history,  men  are 
facing  unabashed  the  facts  of  life.  "  Death  or  life,"  we 
cry,  "  give  us  only  reality ! "  Now,  for  the  first  time 
in  the  history  of  English  literature,  fiction  is  become  a 
flawless  mirror  held  up  to  the  living  world.  Rejecting 
nothing,  altering  nothing,  it  presents  to  us — let  us  take 
our  terms  from  the  bright  lexicon  of  the  reviewer — a 

85 


86   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

"  transcript,"  a  "  cross-section,"  a  "  slice,"  a  "  photo- 
graphic "  or  "cinematographic  "  reproduction  of  life. 
The  critic  who  keeps  pace  with  the  movement  no 
longer  asks  whether  the  artist  has  created  beauty  or 
glorified  goodness,  but  merely  whether  he  has  told  the 
truth. 

Mr.  Dreiser,  in  his  latest  novel,  The  Genius,  describes 
a  canvas  by  a  painter  of  this  austere  modern  school: 
"  Raw  reds,  raw  greens,  dirty  gray  paving  stones — such 
faces!  Why,  this  thing  fairly  shouted  its  facts.  It 
seemed  to  say :  *  I'm  dirty,  I  am  commonplace,  I  am 
grim,  I  am  shabby,  but  I  am  life.'  And  there  was  no 
apologizing  for  anything  in  it,  no  glossing  anything 
over.  Bang !  Smash !  Crack !  came  the  facts  one  after 
another,  with  a  bitter,  brutal  insistence  on  their  so- 
ness."  If  you  do  not  like  what  is  in  the  picture,  you 
are  to  be  crushed  by  the  retort  that  perhaps  you  do  not 
like  what  is  in  life.  Perhaps  you  have  not  courage  to 
confront  reality.  Perhaps  you  had  better  read  the 
chromatic  fairy-tales  with  the  children.  Men  of  sterner 
stuff  exclaim,  "  Thank  God  for  a  realist ! " 

Mr.  Dreiser  is  a  novelist  of  the  new  school,  for  whom 
we  have  been  invited  off  and  on  these  fourteen  years  to 
"  thank  God  " — a  form  of  speech,  by  the  way,  which 
crept  into  the  language  before  the  dawn  of  "  modern  " 
realism.  He  has  performed  with  words  what  his  hero 
performed  with  paint.  He  has  presented  the  facts  of 
life  "  one  after  another  with  a  bitter,  brutal  insistence 
on  their  so-ness,"  which  marks  him  as  a  "  man  of  the 
hour,"  a  "  portent  " — the  successor  of  Mr.  Howells  and 
Mr.  James?  In  the  case  of  a  realist,  biographical  de- 


BARBARIC  NATURALISM  OF  DREISER    87 

tails  are  always  relevant.  Mr.  Dreiser  was  born  of 
German-American  parents  in  Terre  Haute,  Indiana,  in 
1871.  He  was  educated  in  the  Indiana  public  schools 
and  at  the  State  University.  He  was  engaged  in  news- 
paper work  in  Chicago,  St.  Louis,  New  York,  and  else- 
where, from  1892  to  1910.  He  has  published  two  books  , 
of  travel:  A  Traveller  At  Forty,  1913,  and  A  Hoosier 
Holiday,  1916,  which,  without  the  support  of  his  fiction, 
would  entitle  him  to  dispute  with  Mr.  Viereck  for  the 
title  of  vulgarest  voice  yet  heard  in  American  literature ; 
also  a  collection  of  one-act  dramas,  Plays  of  the  Natural 
and  Supernatural,  1916.  But  he  has  laid  reality  bare 
for  us  most  generously  in  his  five  novels,  published  as 
follows:  Sister  Carrie,  1901;  Jennie  Gerhardt,  1911; 
The  Financier,  1912 ;  The  Titan,  1914 ;  and  The  Genius, 
1915.  These  five  works  constitute  a  singularly  homo- 
geneous mass  of  fiction.  I  do  not  find  any  moral  value 
in  them,  nor  any  memorable  beauty — of  their  truth  I 
shall  speak  later ;  but  I  am  greatly  impressed  by  them  as 
serious  representatives  of  a  new  note  in  American  litera- 
ture, coming  from  that  "  ethnic  "  element  of  our  mixed 
population  which,  we  are  assured  by  competent  authori- 
ties, is  to  redeem  us  from  Puritanism  and  insure  our 
artistic  salvation.  They  abundantly  illustrate,  further- 
more, the  methods  and  intentions  of  our  recent  courage- 
ous veracious  realism.  Before  we  thank  God  for  it  let 
us  consider  a  little  more  closely  what  is  offered  us. 

The  first  step  toward  the  definition  of  Mr.  Dreiser's 
special  contribution  is  to  blow  away  the  dust  with  which 
the  exponents  of  the  new  realism  seek  to  becloud  the 
perceptions  of  our  "  reverent  layman."  In  their  main 


88   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

pretensions  there  are  large  elements  of  conscious  and 
unconscious  sham. 

It  should  clear  the  air  to  say  that  courage  in  facing 
and  veracity  in  reporting  the  facts  of  life  are  no  more 
characteristic  of  Theodore  Dreiser  than  of  John 
Bunyan.  These  moral  traits  are  not  the  peculiar  marks 
of  the  new  school ;  they  are  the  marks  common  to  every 
great  movement  of  literature  within  the  memory  of  man. 
Each  literary  generation  detaching  itself  from  its  prede- 
cessor— whether  it  has  called  its  own  movement  Classical 
or  Romantic  or  what  not — has  revolted  in  the  interest 
of  what  it  took  to  be  a  more  adequate  representation  of 
reality.  No  one  who  is  not  drunken  with  the  egotism  of 
the  hour,  no  one  who  has  penetrated  with  sober  senses 
into  the  spirit  of  any  historical  period  anterior  to  his 
own,  will  fall  into  the  indecency  of  declaring  his  own 
age  preeminent  in  the  desire  to  see  and  to  tell  the  truth. 
The  real  distinction  between  one  generation  and  another 
is  in  the  thing  which  each  takes  for  its  master  truth — is 
in  the  thing  which  each  recognizes  as  the  essential  reality 
for  it.  The  difference  between  Bunyan  and  Dreiser  is 
in  the  order  of  facts  which  each  reports. 

It  seems  necessary  also  to  declare  at  periodic  intervals 
that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  a  "  cross-section "  or 
"  slice  "  or  "  photograph  "  of  life  in  art — least  of  all 
in  the  realistic  novel.  The  use  of  these  catchwords  is 
but  a  clever  hypnotizing  pass  of  the  artist,  employed  to 
win  the  assent  of  the  reader  to  the  reality  of  the  show, 
and,  in  some  cases,  to  evade  moral  responsibility  for 
any  questionable  features  of  the  exhibition.  A  realistic 
novel  no  more  than  any  other  kind  of  a  novel  can  escape 


BARBARIC  NATURALISM  OF  DREISER   89 

being  a  composition,  involving  preconception,  imagina- 
tion, and  divination.  Yet,  hearing  one  of  our  new  real- 
ists expound  his  doctrine,  one  might  suppose  that  writ- 
ing a  novel  was  a  process  analogous  to  photographing 
wild  animals  in  their  habitat  by  trap  and  flashlight. 
He,  if  you  will  believe  him,  does  not  invite  his  subjects, 
nor  group  them,  nor  compose  their  features,  nor  furnish 
their  setting.  He  but  exposes  the  sensitized  plate  of  his 
mind.  The  pomp  of  life  goes  by,  and  springs  the  trap. 
The  picture,  of  course,  does  not  teach  nor  preach  nor 
moralize.  It  simply  re-presents.  The  only  serious  ob- 
jection to  this  figurative  explanation  of  the  artistic 
process  is  the  utter  dissimilarity  between  the  blank  im- 
partial photographic  plate,  commemorating  everything 
that  confronts  it,  and  the  crowded,  inveterately  selective 
mind,  which,  like  a  magnet,  snatches  the  facts  of  life  that 
are  subject  to  its  influence  out  of  their  casual  order  and 
redisposes  them  in  a  pattern  of  its  own. 

In  the  case  of  any  specified  novelist,  the  facts  chosen 
and  the  pattern  assumed  by  them  are  determined  by  his 
central  theory  or  "  philosophy  of  life  " ;  and  this  is  pre- 
cisely criticism's  justification  for  inquiring  into  the  ade- 
quacy of  any  novelist's  general  ideas.  In  vain,  the  new 
realist  throws  up  his  hands  with  protestations  of  inno- 
cence, and  cries :  "  Search  me.  I  carry  no  concealed 
weapons.  I  run  life  into  no  preconceived  mold.  I  have 
no  philosophy.  My  business  is  only  to  observe,  like  a  man 
of  science,  and  to  record  what  I  have  seen."  He  cannot 
observe  without  a  theory,  nor  compose  and  record  his 
observations  without  betraying  his  theory  to  any  criti- 
cal eye. 


90   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

As  it  happens,  the  man  of  science  who  most  pro- 
foundly influenced  the  development  of  the  new  realistic 
novel,  Charles  Darwin,  more  candid  than  the  writers  of 
"  scientific  "  fiction,  frankly  declared  that  he  could  not 
observe  without  a  theory.  When  he  had  tentatively 
formulated  a  general  law,  and  had  begun  definitely  to 
look  for  evidence  of  its  operation,  then  first  the  sub- 
stantiating facts  leaped  abundantly  into  his  vision.  His 
Origin  of  Species  has  the  unity  of  a  work  of  art,  because 
the  recorded  observations  support  a  thesis.  The  French 
novelists  who  in  the  last  century  developed  the  novel  of 
contemporary  life  learned  as  much,  perhaps,  from  Dar- 
win's art  as  from  his  science.  The  technique  of  fiction 
imitated  the  procedure  of  scientific  research.  Balzac 
had  emphasized  the  relation  between  man  and  his  social 
milieu;  the  Goncourts  emphasized  the  importance  of 
extensive  "  human  documents  " ;  Zola  emphasized  the 
value  of  scientific  hypotheses.  He  deliberately  adopted 
the  materialistic  philosophy  of  the  period  as  his  guide 
in  observation  and  as  his  unifying  principle  in  composi- 
tion. His  theory  of  the  causes  of  social  phenomena, 
which  was  derived  largely  from  medical  and  physiologi- 
cal treatises,  operated  like  a  powerful  magnet  among  the 
chaotic  facts  of  life,  rejecting  some,  selecting  others,  and 
redisposing  them  in  the  pattern  of  the  roman  naturaliste. 
Judicious  French  critics  said :  "  My  dear  man,"  or 
words  to  that  effect,  "  your  representations  of  life  are 
inadequate.  This  which  you  are  offering  us  with  so 
earnest  an  air  is  not  reality.  It  is  your  own  private 
nightmare."  When  they  had  exposed  his  theory,  they 
had  condemned  his  art. 


BARBARIC  NATURALISM  OF  DREISER    91 

Let  us,  then,  dismiss  Mr.  Dreiser's  pretensions  to 
superior  courage  and  veracity,  the  photographic  trans- 
script,  and  unbiassed  service  of  truth;  and  let  us  seek 
for  his  definition  in  his  general  theory  of  life,  in  the 
order  of  facts  which  he  records,  and  in  the  pattern  of 
his  representations. 

The  impressive  unity  of  effect  produced  by  Mr. 
Dreiser's  five  novels  is  due  to  the  fact  that  they  are  all 
illustrations  of  a  crude  and  naively  simple  naturalistic 
philosophy,  such  as  we  find  in  the  mouths  of  exponents 
of  the  new  Real-Politik.  Each  book,  with  its  bewilder- 
ing mass  of  detail,  is  a  ferocious  argument  in  behalf  of 
a  few  brutal  generalizations.  To  the  eye  cleared  of  illu- 
sions it  appears  that  the  ordered  life  which  we  call  civi- 
lization does  not  exist  except  on  paper.  In  reality  our 
so-called  society  is  a  jungle  in  which  the  struggle  for 
existence  continues,  and  must  continue,  on  terms  sub- 
stantially unaltered  by  legal,  moral,  or  social  conven- 
tions. The  central  truth  about  man  is  that  he  is  an 
animal  amenable  to  no  law  but  the  law  of  his  own 
temperament,  doing  as  he  desires,  subject  only  to  the 
limitations  of  his  power.  The  male  of  the  species  is 
characterized  by  cupidity,  pugnacity,  and  a  simian  in- 
clination for  the  other  sex.  The  female  is  a  soft,  vain, 
pleasure-seeking  creature,  devoted  to  personal  adorn- 
ment, and  quite  helplessly  susceptible  to  the  flattery  of 
the  male.  In  the  struggles  which  arise  in  the  jungle 
through  the  conflicting  appetites  of  its  denizens,  the 
victory  goes  to  the  animal  most  physically  fit  and  men- 
tally ruthless,  unless  the  weaklings,  resisting  absorption, 


92   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

combine  against  him  and  crush  him  by  sheer  force  of 
numbers. 

The  idea  that  civilization  is  a  sham,  Mr.  Dreiser  some- 
times sets  forth  explicitly,  and  sometimes  he  conveys  it 
by  the  process  known  among  journalists  as  "  coloring 
the  news."  When  Sister  Carrie  yields  to  the  seductive 
drummer,  Drouet,  Mr.  Dreiser  judicially  weighs  the 
advantages  and  disadvantages  attendant  on  the  condi- 
tion of  being  a  well-kept  mistress.  When  the  institu- 
tion of  marriage  is  brushed  aside  by  the  heroine  of  The 
Financier,  he  comments  "  editorially  "  as  follows :  "  Be- 
fore Christianity  was  man,  and  after  it  will  also  be.  A 
metaphysical  idealism  will  always  tell  him  that  it  is 
better  to  preserve  a  cleanly  balance,  and  the  storms  of 
circumstance  will  teach  him  a  noble  stoicism.  Beyond 
this  there  is  nothing  which  can  reasonably  be  imposed 
upon  the  conscience  of  man."  A  little  later  in  the  same 
book  he  says :  "  Is  there  no  law  outside  of  the  subtle 
will  and  power  to  achieve  ?  If  not,  it  is  surely  high  time 
that  we  knew  it — one  and  all.  We  might  then  agree  to 
do  as  we  do;  but  there  would  be  no  silly  illusion  as  to 
divine  regulation."  His  own  answer  to  the  question, 
his  own  valuation  of  regulation,  both  divine  and  human, 
may  be  found  in  the  innumerable  contemptuous  epithets 
which  fall  from  his  pen  whenever  he  has  occasion  to 
mention  any  power  set  up  against  the  urge  of  instinct 
and  the  indefinite  expansion  of  desire.  Righteousness  is 
always  "  legal  " ;  conventions  are  always  "  current  " ; 
routine  is  always  "  dull  " ;  respectability  is  always  "  unc- 
tuous " ;  an  institution  for  transforming  schoolgirls 
into  young  ladies  is  presided  over  by  "  owl-like  conven- 


BARBARIC  NATURALISM  OF  DREISER    93 

tionalists  " ;  families  in  which  the  parents  are  faithful 
to  each  other  lead  an  "  apple-pie  order  of  existence  " ;  a 
man  who  yields  to  his  impulses  yet  condemns  himself  for 
yielding  is  a  "  rag-bag  moralistic  ass."  Jennie  Ger- 
hardt,  by  a  facile  surrender  of  her  chastity,  shows  that 
"  she  could  not  be  readily  corrupted  by  the  world's  selfish 
lessons  on  how  to  preserve  oneself  from  the  evil  to  come." 
Surely  this  is  "  coloring  the  news." 

By  similar  devices  Mr.  Dreiser  drives  home  the  great 
truth  that  man  is  essentially  an  animal,  impelled  by 
temperament,  instinct,  physics,  chemistry — anything 
you  please  that  is  irrational  and  uncontrollable.  Some- 
times he  writes  an  "  editorial "  paragraph  in  which  the 
Jaws  of  human  life  are  explained  by  reference  to  the 
behavior  of  certain  protozoa  or  by  reference  to  a  squid 
and  a  lobster  fighting  in  an  aquarium.  His  heroes  and 
heroines  have  "  cat-like  eyes,"  "  feline  grace,"  "  sinuous 
strides,"  eyes  and  jaws  which  vary  "  from  those  of  the 
tiger,  lynx,  and  bear  to  those  of  the  fox,  the  tolerant 
mastiff,  and  the  surly  bulldog."  One  hero  and  his  mis- 
tress are  said  to  "  have  run  together  temperamentally 
like  two  leopards."  The  lady  in  question,  admiring 
the  large  rapacity  of  her  mate,  exclaims  playfully: 
"  Oh,  you  big  tiger !  you  great,  big  lion  !  Boo !  "  Court- 
ship as  presented  in  these  novels  is  after  the  manner  of 
beasts  in  the  jungle.  Mr.  Dreiser's  leonine  men  but 
circle  once  or  twice  about  their  prey,  and  spring,  and 
pounce;  and  the  struggle  is  over.  A  pure-minded 
serving-maid,  who  is  suddenly  held  up  in  the  hall  by  a 
"  hairy,  axiomatic  "  guest  and  "  masterfully  "  kissed 
upon  the  lips,  may  for  an  instant  be  "  horrified,  stunned, 


94   ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

like  a  bird  in  the  grasp  of  a  cat."  But  we  are  always 
assured  that  "  through  it  all  something  tremendously 
vital  and  insistent  "  will  be  speaking  to  her,  and  in  the 
end  she  will  not  resist  the  urge  of  the  elan  vital.  I 
recall  no  one  of  the  dozens  of  obliging  women  in  these 
books  who  makes  any  effective  resistance  when  summoned 
to  capitulate.  "  The  psychology  of  the  human  animal, 
when  confronted  by  these  tangles,  these  ripping  tides  of 
the  heart,"  says  the  author  of  The  Titan,  "  has  little  to 
do  with  so-called  reason  or  logic."  No;  as  he  informs 
us  elsewhere  in  endless  iteration,  it  is  a  question  of 
chemistry.  It  is  the  "chemistry  of  her  being"  (that 
of  the  female  in  question)  which  rouses  to  blazing  the 
ordinarily  dormant  forces  of  Eugene  Witla's  sympathies 
in  The  Genius.  If  Stephanie  Platow  is  disloyal  to  her 
married  lover  in  The  Titan,  "  let  no  one  quarrel "  with 
her.  Reason :  "  She  was  an  unstable  chemical  com- 
pound." 

Such  is  the  Dreiserian  philosophy. 

By  thus  eliminating  distinctively  human  motives  and 
making  animal  instincts  the  supreme  factors  in  human 
life,  Mr.  Dreiser  reduces  the  problem  of  the  novelist  to 
the  lowest  possible  terms.  I  find  myself  unable  to  go 
with  those  who  admire  the  powerful  reality  of  his  art 
while  deploring  the  puerility  of  his  philosophy.  His 
philosophy  quite  excludes  him  from  the  field  in  which 
the  great  realist  must  work.  He  has  deliberately  re- 
jected the  novelist's  supreme  task — understanding  and 
presenting  the  development  of  character ;  he  has  chosen 
only  to  illustrate  the  unrestricted  flow  of  temperament. 
He  has  evaded  the  enterprise  of  representing  human  con- 


BARBARIC  NATURALISM  OF  DREISER    95 

duct ;  he  has  confined  himself  to  a  representation  of  ani- 
mal behavior.  He  demands  for  the  demonstration  of  his 
theory  a  moral  vacuum  from  which  the  obligations  of 
parenthood,  marriage,  chivalry,  and  citizenship  have 
been  quite  withdrawn  or  locked  in  a  twilight  sleep.  At 
each  critical  moment  in  his  narrative,  where  a  realist 
like  George  Eliot  or  Thackeray  or  Trollope  or  Meredith 
would  be  asking  how  a  given  individual  would  feel,  think, 
and  act  under  the  manifold  combined  stresses  of  organ- 
ized society,  Mr.  Dreiser  sinks  supinely  back  upon  the 
law  of  the  jungle  or  mutters  his  mystical  gibberish  about 
an  alteration  of  the  chemical  formula. 

The  possibility  of  making  the  unvarying  victorious- 
ness  of  jungle-motive  plausible  depends  directly  upon 
the  suppression  of  the  evidence  of  other  motives.  In  this 
work  of  suppression  Mr.  Dreiser  simplifies  American  life 
almost  beyond  recognition.  Whether  it  is  because  he 
comes  from  Indiana,  or  whether  it  is  because  he  steadily 
envisages  the  human  animal,  I  cannot  say;  I  can  only 
note  that  he  never  speaks  of  his  men  and  women  as  "  edu- 
cated "  or  "  brought  up."  Whatever  their  social  status, 
they  are  invariably  "  raised."  Raising  human  stock  in 
America  evidently  includes  feeding  and  clothing  it,  but 
does  not  include  the  inculcation  of  even  the  most  ele- 
mentary moral  ideas.  Hence  Mr.  Dreiser's  field  seems 
curiously  outside  American  society.  Yet  he  repeatedly 
informs  us  that  his  persons  are  typical  of  the  American 
middle  class,  and  three  of  the  leading  figures,  to  judge 
from  their  names — Carrie  Meeber,  Jennie  Gerhardt,  and 
Eugene  Witla — are  of  our  most  highly  "  cultured  "  race. 
Frank  Cowperwood,  the  hero  of  two  novels,  is  a  hawk  of 


96       ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

finance  and  a  rake  almost  from  the  cradle;  but  of  the 
powers  which  presided  over  his  cradle  we  know  nothing 
save  that  his  father  was  a  competent  officer  in  a  Phila- 
delphia bank.  What,  if  anything,  Carrie  Meeber's  typi- 
cal American  parents  taught  her  about  the  conduct  of 
life  is  suppressed;  for  we  meet  the  girl  in  a  train  to 
Chicago,  on  which  she  falls  to  the  first  drummer  who 
accosts  her.  From  the  bosom  of  a  typical  middle-class 
American  family,  Eugene  Witla  emerges  in  his  teens 
with  a  knowledge  of  the  game  called  post-office,  takes 
the  train  for  Chicago,  and  without  hesitation  enters 
upon  his  long  career  of  seduction.  Jennie  Gerhardt,  of 
course,  succumbs  to  the  first  man  who  puts  his  arm 
around  her;  but,  in  certain  respects,  her  case  is 
exceptional. 

In  Jennie  Gerhardt  Mr.  Dreiser  ventures  a  disastrous 
experiment  at  making  the  jungle-motive  plausible  with- 
out suppressing  the  evidence  of  other  motives.  He  pro- 
vides the  girl  with  pious  Lutheran  parents,  of  fallen 
fortune,  but  alleged  to  be  of  sterling  character,  who 
"  raise  "  her  with  utmost  strictness.  He  even  admits 
that  the  family  were  church-goers,  and  he  outlines  the 
doctrine  preached  by  Pastor  Wundt:  right  conduct 
in  marriage  and  absolute  innocence  before  that  state  as 
essentials  of  Christian  living ;  no  salvation  for  a  daugh- 
ter who  failed  to  keep  her  chastity  unstained,  or  for  the 
parents  who  permitted  her  to  fall ;  Hell  yawning  for  all 
such ;  God  angry  with  sinners  every  day.  "  Gerhardt 
and  his  wife,  and  also  Jennie,"  says  Mr.  Dreiser,  "  ac- 
cepted the  doctrines  of  their  church  without  reserve." 
Twenty  pages  later  Jennie  is  represented  as  yielding  her 


BARBARIC  NATURALISM  OF  DREISER   97 

virtue  in  pure  gratitude  to  a  man  of  fifty,  Senator 
Brander,  who  has  let  her  do  ( his  laundry  and  in  other 
ways  has  been  kind  to  her  and  her  family.  The  Senator 
suddenly  dies;  Jennie  expects  to  become  a  mother; 
Father  Gerhardt  is  broken-hearted;  and  the  family 
moves  from  Columbus  to  Cleveland.  The  first  episode  is 
perhaps  not  altogether  incredibly  presented  as  a  mo- 
mentary triumph  of  emotional  impulse  over  training — as 
an  "  accident."  The  incredible  appears  when  Mr. 
Dreiser  insists  that  an  accident  of  this  sort  to  a  girl 
brought  up  in  the  conditions  stated  is  not  necessarily 
followed  by  any  sense  of  sin  or  shame  or  regret.  Upon 
this  simple  pious  Lutheran  he  imposes  his  own  natural- 
istic philosophy,  and,  in  analyzing  her  psychology  be- 
fore the  birth  of  her  illegitimate  child,  pretends  that  she 
looks  forward  to  the  event  "  without  a  murmur,"  with 
"  serene,  unfaltering  courage,"  "  the  marvel  of  life  hold- 
ing her  in  a  trance,"  "  with  joy  and  satisfaction,"  see- 
ing in  her  state  "  the  immense  possibilities  of  racial  ful- 
filment." This  juggling  is  probably  expected  to  pre- 
pare us  for  her  instantaneous  assent,  perhaps  a  year 
later,  when  a  healthy  magnetic  manufacturer,  who  has 
seen  her  perhaps  a  dozen  times,  claps  his  paw  upon  her 
and  says,  "  You  belong  to  me,"  and  in  a  perfectly  cold- 
blooded interview,  proposes  the  terms  on  which  he  will 
set  her  up  in  New  York  as  his  mistress.  Jennie,  who  is 
a  fond  mother  and  a  dutiful  daughter,  goes  to  her  pious 
Lutheran  mother  and  talks  the  whole  matter  over  with 
her  quite  candidly.  The  mother  hesitates — not  on 
Jennie's  account,  gentle  reader,  but  because  she  will  be 
obliged  to  deceive  old  Gerhardt ;  "  the  difficulty  of  tell- 


ing  this  lie  was  very  great  for  Mrs.  Gerhardt  " !  But 
she  acquiesces  at  last.  "  I'll  help  you  out  with  it,"  she 
concludes — "  with  a  little  sigh."  The  unreality  of  the 
Avhole  transaction  shrieks. 

Mr.  Dreiser's  stubborn  insistence  upon  the  jungle- 
motive  results  in  a  dreary  monotony  in  the  form  and  sub- 
stance of  his  novels.  Interested  only  in  the  description 
of  animal  behavior,  he  constructs  his  plot  in  such  a  way 
as  to  exhibit  the  persistence  of  two  or  three  elementary 
instincts  through  every  kind  of  situation.  He  finds,  for 
example,  a  subject  in  the  career  of  an  American  captain 
of  industry,  thinly  disguised  under  the  name  of  Frank 
Cowperwood.  He  has  just  two  things  to  tell  us  about 
Cowperwood:  that  he  has  a  rapacious  appetite  for 
money ;  and  that  he  has  a  rapacious  appetite  for  women. 
In  The  Financier  he  "  documents  "  these  truths  about 
Cowperwood  in  seventy-four  chapters,  in  each  of  which 
he  shows  us  how  his  hero  made  money  or  how  he  capti- 
vated women  in  Philadelphia.  Not  satisfied  with  the 
demonstration,  he  returns  to  the  same  thesis  in  The 
Titan,  and  shows  us  in  sixty-two  chapters  how  the  same 
hero  made  money  and  captivated  women  in  Chicago  and 
in  New  York.  He  promises  us  a  third  volume,  in  which 
we  shall  no  doubt  learn  in  a  work  of  sixty  or  seventy 
chapters — a  sort  of  huge  club-sandwich  composed  of 
slices  of  business  alternating  with  erotic  episodes — how 
Frank  Cowperwood  made  money  and  captivated  women 
in  London.  Meanwhile  Mr.  Dreiser  has  turned  aside 
from  his  great  "  trilogy  of  desire "  to  give  us  The 
Genius,  in  which  the  hero,  Witla,  alleged  to  be  a  great 
realistic  painter,  exhibits  in  100  chapters  similarly  sand- 


BARBARIC  NATURALISM  OF  DREISER    99 

wiched  together,  an  appetite  for  women  and  money  in- 
distinguishable from  that  of  Cowperwood.  Read  one  of 
these  novels  and  you  have  read  them  all.  What  the 
hero  is  in  the  first  chapter,  he  remains  in  the  one  hundred 
and  first  and  the  one  hundred  and  thirty-sixth.  He 
acquires  naught  from  his  experiences  but  sensations. 
In  the  sum  of  his  experience  there  is  nothing  of  the  im- 
pressive mass  and  coherence  of  activities  bound  together 
by  principles  and  integrated  in  character,  for  all  his 
days  have  been  but  as  isolated  beads  loosely  strung  on 
the  thread  of  his  desire.  And  so  after  the  production 
of  the  hundredth  document  in  the  case  of  Frank  Cowper- 
wood, one  is  ready  to  cry  with  fatigue :  "  Hold !  Enough ! 
We  believe  you.  Yes,  it  is  very  clear  that  Frank  Cow- 
perwood had  a  rapacious  appetite  for  women  and  for 
money." 

If  at  this  point  you  stop  and  inquire  why  Mr.  Dreiser 
goes  to  such  great  lengths  to  establish  so  little,  you  find 
yourself  once  more  confronting  the  jungle-motive.  Mr. 
Dreiser,  with  a  problem  similar  to  De  Foe's  in  The  Ap- 
parition of  Mrs.  Veal,  has  availed  himself  of  De  Foe's 
method  for  creating  the  illusion  of  reality.  The  essence 
of  the  problem  for  both  these  authors  is  the  certification 
of  the  unreal  by  the  irrelevant.  If  you  wish  to  make 
acceptable  to  your  reader  the  incredible  notion  that 
Mrs.  Veal's  ghost  appeared  to  Mrs.  Bargrave  divert  his 
incredulity  from  the  precise  point  at  issue  by  telling  him 
all  sorts  of  detailed  credible  things  about  the  poverty 
of  Mrs.  Veal's  early  life,  the  sobriety  of  her  brother, 
her  father's  neglect,  and  the  bad  temper  of  Mrs.  Bar- 
grave's  husband.  If  you  wish  to  make  acceptable  to 


100     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

your  reader  the  incredible  notion  that  Aileen  Butler's 
first  breach  of  the  seventh  article  in  the  decalogue  was 
"  a  happy  event,"  taking  place  "  much  as  a  marriage 
might  have,"  divert  his  incredulity  by  describing  with 
the  technical  accuracy  of  a  fashion  magazine  not  merely 
the  gown  she  wore  on  the  night  of  Cowperwood's  recep- 
tion, but  also  with  equal  detail  the  half-dozen  other 
gowns  that  she  thought  she  might  wear,  but  did  not.  If 
you  have  been  for  three  years  editor-in-chief  of  the 
Butterick  publications  you  can  probably  persuade  your 
readers  that  you  are  a  master  of  the  subject,  and  having 
acquired  credit  for  expert  knowledge  in  matters  of  dress 
and  millinery,  you  can  now  and  then  emit  unchallenged 
a  bit  of  philosophy  such  as  "  Life  cannot  be  put  in  any 
one  mold,  and  the  attempt  may  as  well  be  abandoned  at 
once.  .  .  .  Besides,  whether  we  will  or  not,  theory  or 
no  theory,  the  large  basic  facts  of  chemistry  and  physics 
remain."  None  the  less,  if  you  expect  to  gain  credence 
for  the  notion  that  your  hero  can  have  any  woman  in 
Chicago  or  New  York  that  he  puts  his  paw  upon,  you 
had  probably  better  lead  up  to  it  by  a  detailed  account 
of  the  street-railway  system  in  those  cities.  It  will 
necessitate  the-  loading  of  your  pages  with  a  tremendous 
baggage  of  irrelevant  detail.  It  will  not  sound  much 
like  the  fine  art  of  fiction.  It  will  sound  more  like  one 
of  Lincoln  Steffens's  special  articles.  But  it  will  pro- 
duce an  overwhelming  impression  of  reality,  which  the 
reader  will  carry  with  him  into  the  next  chapter  where 
you  are  laying  bare  the  "  chemistry  "  of  the  human 
animal. 

It  would  make  for  clearness  in  our  discussions  of  con- 


BARBARIC  NATURALISM  OF  DREISER  101 

temporary  fiction  if  we  withheld  the  title  of  "  realist " 
from  a  writer  like  Mr.  Dreiser,  and  called  him,  as  Zola 
called  himself,  a  "  naturalist."  While  asserting  that 
all  great  art  in  every  period  intends  a  representation 
of  reality,  I  have  tried  to  indicate  the  basis  for  a  work- 
ing distinction  between  the  realistic  novel  and  the  natur- 
alistic novel  of  the  present  day.  Both  are  representa- 
tions of  the  life  of  man  in  contemporary  or  nearly 
contemporary  society,  and  both  are  presumably  com- 
posed of  materials  within  the  experience  and  observation 
of  the  author.  But  the  realistic  novel  is  a  representa- 
tion based  upon  a  theory  of  human  conduct.  If  the 
theory  of  human  conduct  is  adequate,  the  representa- 
tion constitutes  an  addition  to  literature  and  to  social 
history.  A  naturalistic  novel  is  a  representation  based 
upon  a  theory  of  animal  behavior.  Since  a  theory  of 
animal  behavior  can  never  be  an  adequate  basis  for  a 
representation  of  the  life  of  man  in  contemporary 
society,  such  a  representation  is  an  artistic  blunder. 
When  half  the  world  attempts  to  assert  such  a  theory, 
the  other  half  rises  in  battle.  And  so  one  turns  with 
relief  from  Mr.  Dreiser's  novels  to  the  morning  papers. 


IV 
THE  REALISM  OF  ARNOLD  BENNETT 

IN  discussing  the  work  of  Mr.  Dreiser,  I  have  offered 
a  protest  against  the  confusion  which  results  from  call- 
ing all  novelists  who  deal  with  contemporary  life  real- 
ists ;  and  I  have  proposed,  as  a  means  of  making  useful 
and  important  distinctions  among  them,  a  scrutiny  of 
the  bundle  of  general  ideas  which  constitute  for  each  his 
"  working  philosophy,"  and  which,  as  I  maintained, 
necessarily  underlie  the  artistic  representation  of  each 
and  in  considerable  measure  determine  its  form.  When 
I  had  traced  the  lack  of  verisimilitude  in  the  Dreiserian 
novel  to  Mr.  Dreiser's  perverse  and  libellous  "  theory  of 
animal  behavior  "  and,  on  that  basis,  had  proposed  to 
designate  him  as  a  naturalist,!  felt  the  need  of  supple- 
menting my  argument  by  exhibiting  the  relationship,  in 
some  popular  exemplar,  between  genuine  realism  and  a 
"  respectable  theory  of  human  conduct." 

Arnold  Bennett  at  once  appeared  in  at  least  one 
respect  to  be  a  promising  candidate  for  the  position. 
His  works,  to  be  sure,  are  of  very  unequal  value;  for, 
frankly  writing  to  live,  he  has  diversified  the  production 
of  masterpieces  by  the  quite  unscrupulous  production  of 
pot-boilers.  Yet  all  sorts  of  good  judges  unite  in 
declaring  that  his  best  novels — The  Old  Wives'  Tale  and 
the  Clayhanger  trilogy,  including  Clayhanger,  Hilda, 

103 


REALISM  OF  ARNOLD  BENNETT       103 

Lessways,  and  These  Twain — produce  upon  them  an 
unprecedented  impression  of  reality.  These  books,  we 
are  told,  challenge  and  endure  comparison  not  with 
other  books  but  with  life  itself.  Their  "  transcript  "  of 
Five  Towns  society  is  so  full,  detailed,  and  accurate  that 
it  may  be  used  by  the  student  of  human  nature  almost 
as  confidently  as  first-hand  observation.  I  was  glad  to 
find  general  agreement  on  this  point,  for  it  relieved  me 
of  the  task  of  justifying  my  own  conviction  that  Mr. 
Bennett  isvin  effect,  a  realist. 

The  only  objection  that  I  saw  to  the  choice  of  Mr. 
Bennett  as  a  contemporary  realist  was  that  the  very 
critics  who  praise  the  reality  of  his  representations  insist 
sternly  that  he  has  no  "  philosophy  in  life,"  that  he  rep- 
resents no  ideal,  that  he  does  not  "  interpret  "  his  facts, 
that  his  value  resides  wholly  in  the  energetic  integrity 
of  his  transcript.  Mr.  Darton,  himself  a  novelist,  says 
in  his  recent  study  of  his  fellow  craftsman :  "  In  the 
Five  Towns  novels  there  is  no  ideal.  There  is  no  criti- 
cism. There  is  no  tradition  or  philosophy  of  society. 
There  is  nothing  but  life  as  the  people  described  live  it 
and  see  it  and  feel  it."  This  is  highly  interesting,  if 
it  is  true.  If  it  is  true,  it  disposes  of  my  contention  that 
an  artist  cannot  observe  without  a  theory.  If  it  is  true, 
it  should  suggest  to  the  younger  generation  of  novelists 
who  are  looking  to  Mr.  Bennett  as  their  master  the 
wisdom  of  making  all  haste  to  get  rid  of  their  ideas. 

Mr.  Barton's  assertion  that  Arnold  Bennett's  work 
has  no  value  save  that  of  mere  representation  was  antici- 
pated by  Henry  James  in  his  discussion  of  the  "  new 
novel "  in  1914,  and  was  by  him  extended  to  an  entire 


104.  ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

group  of  the  younger  writers,  of  which  he  specified  Mr. 
Bennett  and  Mr.  Wells  as  the  leaders.  The  distin- 
guishing characteristic  of  the  group,  according  to  Mr. 
James,  is  "  saturation."  By  this  he  means,  as  I  take  it, 
that  all  these  novelists,  and  to  a  high  degree  their  lead- 
ers, are  masters  of  the  materials  of  their  art.  They 
know  with  extraordinary  completeness  and  detail  what 
they  are  talking  about,  but  when  they  have  made  us  see 
what  they  have  seen,  they  yield  us  no  further  satisfac- 
tion. They  squeeze  the  sponge  or,  as  Mr.  James  puts 
it,  the  "  orange  " ;  this  gives  us  an  "  expression  of  life." 
Expectant  but  disappointed  criticism  cries :  "  Yes, 
yes, — but  is  this  all?  These  are  the  circumstances  of  the 
interest — we  see,  we  see ;  but  where  is  the  interest  itself, 
where  and  what  is  its  center,  and  how  are  we  to  measure 
it  in  relation  to  that  ?  " 

I  cannot  follow  a  critic  who  finds  Wells  and  Bennett 
alike  in  their  dominant  value,  and,  what  is  far  more  in- 
teresting, neither  can  Mr.  Wells!  Stung  to  the  quick 
of  his  celestial  mind  by  the  polite  implication  that  he  is 
only  a  thoroughly  immersed  sponge,  he  has  retorted 
in  his  semi-pseudonymous  Boon,  1915,  with  a  scath- 
ing criticism  and  a  "  take-off  "  on  Mr.  James,  whom  he 
links  with  Mr.  George  Moore  by  virtue  of  their  sterile 
aestheticizing.  That  is  their  dominant  "  value  " — their 
central  "  interest."  His  own  central  interest,  as  he 
reasserts  with  more  than  customary  vehemence  and 
formlessness,  is  the  expression  of  his  yearning  for  a  life 
of  divine  efficiency  and  divine  ecstasy.  He  has  a  theory 
of  conduct  which  has  developed  out  of  that  romantic 
yearning;  and  his  representations  of  life  in  fiction  are 


REALISM  OF  ARNOLD  BENNETT       105 

experimental  illustrations  of  that  theory.  It  is  quite 
absurd  to  charge  an  author  with  "  mere  representation," 
who  almost  invariably  bursts  the  outlines  of  his  hero, 
disrupts  his  narrative  in  mid-career,  shatters  the  illu- 
sion of  reality,  and  buries  all  the  characters  under  the 
avalanche  of  his  own  personal  dreams  and  desires.  Mr. 
Wells,  in  brief,  cherishes  a  "  philosophy  of  life  "  which 
makes  it  impossible  for  him  to  write  a  realistic  novel. 
He  is  dedicated  to  romance.  His  high  calling  is  to  write 
pseudo-scientific  fantasies  and  fairy  tales  of  contempo- 
rary society. 

Mr.  Wells  in  Boon  incidentally  repudiates  yoke- 
fellowship  with  the  novelist  of  the  Five  Towns  in  a  pas- 
sage which  gives  us  the  key  to  Mr.  Bennett's  "  philo- 
sophical "  position.  Mr.  Bennett  is  there  recorded  as  a 
"  derelict,"  an  "  imperfectly  developed,"  an  "  aborted  " 
great  man  surviving  from  the  old  times :  "  Would  have 
made  a  Great  Victorian  and  had  a  crowd  of  satellite 
helpers.  No  one  will  ever  treasure  his  old  hats  and 
pipes."  This  is  both  amusing  and  instructive.  Mr. 
Wells  does  not  call  a  man  a  Victorian  without  malice 
aforethought.  If  I  may  be  pardoned  a  violent  expres- 
sion, Mr.  Wells  would  like  to  slay  all  the  Victorians; 
better  still,  he  would  like  to  believe  that  they  are  all 
dead.  What  he  objects  to  in  that  generation  is  not  the 
"  mere  representation  "  of  the  novelist ;  it  is  the  accursed 
philosophy  of  life  which  underlies  their  representations. 
Mr.  Bennett  rises  up  to  prove,  alas,  that  this  philos- 
ophy is  not  dead  yet.  His  solid  realistic  novels  protest 
against  Mr.  Wells's  fairy  tales.  His  vision  of  life  pro- 
tests against  Mr.  Wells's  vision  of  life.  The  Old  Wives9 


106     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

Tale  makes  The  Research  Magnificent  look  like  child's 
play.  Put  These  Twain  beside  Marriage,  and  instantly 
the  art  of  the  latter  seems  flimsy  and  incondite,  and  its 
informing  ideas  fantastic.  And  one  may  perhaps  just 
note  in  passing  that  beside  any  one  of  Mr.  Bennett's 
novels,  Mr.  Dreiser's  Genius  instantly  appears  to  be  a 
barbaric  yawp.  An  author  whose  work  thus  judges,  so 
to  speak,  another  work  with  which  it  is  brought  into 
contact,  has  a  potent  critical  value  meriting  exami- 
nation. 

The  popular  impression  that  Mr.  Bennett  has  no  gen- 
eral ideas  is  easily  explained  by  the  fact  that  he  does  not 
attempt,  as  Mr.  Wells  does,  to  break  down  the  boun- 
daries between  the  literary  genres,  and  to  make  the 
novel  serve  at  the  same  time  as  a  narrative  of  events 
and  as  a  philosophical  dissertation.  Respecting  the  per- 
sonalities of  his  dramatis  personae,  wishing  to  preserve 
the  sharpness  of  their  outlines  in  their  own  atmosphere, 
he  does  not  obviously  impute  to  them  his  ideas  nor  set 
them  to  discussing  them.  With  a  restraint  unusual 
among  English  novelists,  he  refrains  from  elaborate 
"  editorial  "  comment  upon  his  "  news."  When  he  wishes 
to  set  forth  his  ideas  explicitly,  he  writes  a  book  of 
popular  philosophy:  Mental  Efficiency,  The  Feast  of 
St.  Friend,  The  Plain  Man  and  His  Wife.  If  these 
books  were  as  well  known  to  the  American  public  as  the 
novels  are,  we  should  hear  no  more  in  this  country  about 
Mr.  Bennett's  lack  of  ideas.  On  the  contrary,  all  our 
women's  clubs  would  be  debating,  in  their  eager  simple- 
hearted  fashion,  "  The  Philosophy  of  Arnold  Bennett." 

Mr.  Darton,  more  sophisticated  than  our  fellow  coun- 


REALISM  OF  ARNOLD  BENNETT       107 

trymen,  says  in  effect  that  the  philosophy  in  these 
books  is  not  worth  discussing;  and  it  does  not  seem  to 
occur  to  him  that  it  can  have  any  bearing  upon  Mr. 
Bennett's  fiction.  The  works  named  above  have  been 
advertised  in  England,  he  tells  us,  as  containing  "  big, 
strong,  vital  thinking."  But,  he  continues,  "  big, 
strong,  vital  thinking  is  just  what  these  remarkable 
little  books  do  not  contain.  They  contain  the  com- 
pletest  common-sense,  expressed  with  astonishing  sim- 
plicity and  directness,  and  based  upon  unimpeachable 
honesty  of  outlook.  They  are  a  guide  to  efficiency,  to 
self-help,  to  practical  idealism,  to  alertness  of  intelli- 
gence, to  sinewy  culture,  to  every  high  quality  which 
every  crass  Briton  has  always  thought  the  crass  Briton 
does  not  show.  The  United  Kingdom  is  almost  over- 
stocked with  agencies  for  the  purpose,  from  the  physical 
energies  of  Mr.  Sandow  to  the  benevolent  writing  of  the 
late  Lord  Avebury.  .  .  .  They  are  quite  perfect  lay  ser- 
mons. But  " — and  these  are  the  damning  words — "  they 
are  not  original."  I  perfectly  agree  that  Mr.  Bennett's 
general  ideas  are  not  "  original,"  and  on  the  whole  com- 
mend his  judgment  in  not  tying  up  his  art  to  anything 
so  transitory  as  a  "  new  "  philosophy.  I  object  to  the 
implication,  in  which  Mr.  Wells  will  rejoice,  that  because 
they  are  old  they  are  dead  or  deficient  in  strength  and 
vitality.  I  will  not  stand  upon  the  word  "  big,"  a  term 
which  should  be  reserved  for  the  use  of  advertizing  man- 
agers and  radical  reformers.  But  I  cannot  reconcile 
Mr.  Darton's  description  of  these  books  as  guides  to 
every  high  quality  needed  by  the  crass  Briton  with  his 
assertion  that  there  is  no  criticism  in  the  Five  Towns 


108     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

novels,  except  on  what  seems  to  me  the  untenable  as- 
sumption that  Mr.  Bennett,  the  popular  novelist,  and 
Mr.  Bennett,  the  popular  philosopher,  are  distinct  and 
non-communicating  beings.  I  shall  attempt  to  show 
that  the  novelist's  treatises  on  conduct  are  related  to  his 
artistic  representation  of  it. 

The  beginning  of  wisdom,  according  to  this  philos- 
ophy, which  runs  counter  to  our  current  naturalism,  is 
the  recognition  of  a  fundamental  duality  in  human  ex- 
perience. Mr.  Bennett  presumes  not  God  to  scan.  He 
is  as  completely  emancipated  from  religious  metaphysics 
as  any  of  his  contemporaries.  Like  a  true  child  of  his 
scientific  age,  he  takes  nothing  on  authority;  he  brings 
everything  to  the  test  of  his  experience.  But  looking 
into  himself  as  a  microcosm,  he  sees  and  reports  that  the 
universe  consists  of  a  controlling  power,  which  is  the 
quintessence  of  man;  and  of  a  power  to  be  controlled, 
which  is  nature.  The  zest,  the  object,  the  compensation 
of  existence  lie  in  the  possibility  of  extending  the  domin- 
ion of  the  human  over  the  natural  power,  the  voluntary 
over  the  involuntary  impulses,  the  conscious  over  the  un- 
conscious agents.  "  For  me,"  he  says,  "  spiritual  content 
(I  will  not  use  the  word  '  happiness,'  which  implies  too 
much)  springs  from  no  mental  or  physical  facts.  It 
springs  from  the  spiritual  fact  that  there  is  something 
higher  in  man  than  the  mind,  and  that  something  can 
control  the  mind.  Call  that  something  the  soul,  or  what 
you  will.  My  sense  of  security  amid  the  collisions  of 
existence  lies  in  the  firm  consciousness  that  just  as  my 
body  is  the  servant  of  my  mind,  so  is  my  mind  the  serv- 
ant of  me.  An  unruly  servant,  but  a  servant  and  pos- 


REALISM  OF  ARNOLD  BENNETT       109 

sibly  less  unruly  every  day!  Often  have  I  said  to  that 
restive  brain :  '  Now,  O  mind,  sole  means  of  communica- 
tion between  the  me  and  all  external  phenomena,  you 
are  not  a  free  agent ;  you  are  subordinate ;  you  are  noth- 
ing but  a  piece  of  machinery ;  and  obey  me  you  shall." 

The  responsibility  for  extending  the  dominion  of  man 
over  his  own  nature  and,  indirectly,  over  his  remoter 
circumstances,  Mr.  Bennett,  in  opposition  to  our  popu- 
lar sociological  doctors,  places  primarily  upon  the  indi- 
vidual. While  Mr.  Wells,  for  example,  urges  us  to  cast 
our  burdens  and  our  sins  upon  society,  and  goes  about 
beating  up  enthusiasm  for  schemes  to  improve  the  "  mind 
of  the  race  "  by  leagues  of  Samurai  and  legislative  enact- 
ments, Mr.  Bennett  fixes  his  eye  upon  plain  John  Smith, 
and  says :  "  I  am  convinced  that  we  have  already  too 
many  societies  for  the  furtherance  of  our  ends.  To  my 
mind,  most  societies  with  a  moral  aim  are  merely  clumsy 
machines  for  doing  simple  jobs  with  a  maximum  of  fric- 
tion, expense,  and  inefficiency.  I  should  define  the 
majority  of  these  societies  as  a  group  of  persons  each 
of  whom  expects  the  other  to  do  something  very  wonder- 
ful. Why  create  a  society  in  order  to  help  you  perform 
some  act  which  nobody  can  perform  but  yourself?  " 
Arnold  Bennett  says  disappointingly  little  about  that 
"  big  "  idea,  "  the  mind  of  the  race."  And  whenever  he 
contemplates  that  impressive  and  admired  abstraction 
"  the  backbone  of  the  nation,"  it  resolves  itself  under 
his  realistic  gaze  into  the  by-him-no-less-admired  but 
certainly  less  generally  impressive  spinal  columns  of 
John  Smith  and  other  homely  vertebrates. 

In  dealing  with  the  relations  of  John  Smith  to  Mrs. 


110     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

Smith,  the  Victorian  Bennett  feels  obliged  to  say,  in 
opposition  to  those  who  hold  out  for  these  plain  people 
the  prospect  of  a  life  of  freedom  and  sustained  ecstasy 
to  be  attained  by  upsetting  the  established  order,  that 
most  of  our  ideas  of  freedom  and  ecstasy  are  romantic 
will-o'-the  wisps.  In  the  recent  "  evolution  "  of  society 
he  perceives  rapid  changes  for  the  better  in  living  condi- 
tions and  a  gradual  amelioration  of  manners  and  tastes, 
but  no  significant  alteration  in  the  elements  of  human 
nature.  "  Passionate  love,"  he  insists,  "  does  not  mean 
happiness ;  it  means  excitement,  apprehension,  and  con- 
tinually renewed  desires."  "  Luxury,"  he  adds,  "  ac- 
cording to  the  universal  experience  of  those  who  have  had 
it,  has  no  connection  whatever  with  happiness."  "  Hap- 
piness as  it  is  dreamed  of  cannot  possibly  exist  save  for 
short  periods  of  self-deception  which  are  followed  by  ter- 
rible periods  of  reaction.  Real  practicable  happiness 
is  due  primarily  not  to  any  kind  of  environment,  but  to 
an  inward  state  of  mind.  Real  happiness  consists  first 
in  an  acceptance  of  the  facts  that  discontent  is  a  condi- 
tion of  life,  and,  second,  in  an  honest  endeavor  to  adjust 
conduct  to  an  ideal." 

It  must  infuriate  an  advocate  of  moral  revolution  like 
Mr.  Wells,  to  hear  Mr.  Bennett,  bracketed  with  him  as 
a  leader  of  the  new  school,  asserting  that  "  the  great 
principles,  spiritual  and  moral,  remain  intact."  It 
must  perplex  an  apologist  for  moral  anarchy  and  stri- 
dent self-assertion  like  Mr.  Dreiser  to  find  a  fellow  real- 
ist declaring  that  "  after  all  the  shattering  discoveries 
of  science  and  conclusions  of  philosophy,  mankind  has 
still  to  live  with  dignity  amid  hostile  nature,"  and  that 


REALISM  OF  ARNOLD  BENNETT       111 

mankind  can  succeed  in  this  tremendous  feat  only  "  by 
the  exercise  of  faith  and  of  that  mutual  good  will  which 
is  based  on  sincerity  and  charity."  But  what  must  dis- 
tress them  beyond  measure  is  this  able  craftsman's  expo- 
sition of  the  relation  of  moral  conventions  to  artistic 
form.  "  What  form  is  in  art,  conventions  are  in  life. 
.  .  .  No  art  that  is  not  planned  in  form  is  worth  con- 
sideration, and  no  life  that  is  not  planned  in  conventions 
can  ever  be  satisfactory.  .  .  .  The  full  beauty  of 
an  activity  is  never  brought  out  until  it  is  subjected  to 
discipline  and  strict  ordering  and  nice  balancing.  A 
life  without  petty  artificiality  would  be  the  life  of  a 
tiger  in  the  forest.  .  .  .  Laws  and  rules,  forms  and 
ceremonies  are  good  in  themselves,  from  a  merely 
aesthetic  point  of  view,  apart  from  their  social  value  and 
necessity." 

These  are  the  ideas  of  a  man  who  has  taken  his  stand 
against  Mr.  Wells's  Utopia  on  the  one  hand  and  against 
Mr.  Dreiser's  jungle  on  the  other.  As  old  as  civilized 
society,  they  have  the  conservative  complexion  of  all 
traditional  and  enduring  things.  They  are  not  worth 
discussing  if  they  are  not  challenged.  Like  fire  and 
water,  they  do  not  appear  vital  till  they  are  denied. 
Ordinarily  a  novelist  has  not  needed  consciously  to 
concern  himself  with  them  unless  he  has  intended  to 
trample  them  under  foot.  But  in  the  face  of  the  present 
naturalistic  invasion,  when  humanistic  ideas  are  in  the 
trenches,  under  fire,  fighting  for  existence,  a  novelist 
who  paints  men  in  preference  to  tigers,  supermen,  or 
scientific  angels,  has  interestingly  taken  sides.  His 
preference  is  an  entirely  discussable  "  criticism  of  life." 


112     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

The  general  theme  of  Mr.  Bennett's  masterpieces, 
determined  by  the  central  interest  of  his  philosophy,  is 
the  development  of  character  in  relation  to  a  society 
which  is  also  developing.  He  has  no  foolishly  simple 
mechanical  formula  for  the  process.  He  has  rather  a 
sense  that  this  relationship  involves  an  interplay  of 
forces  of  fascinating  and  inexplicable  complexity. 

His  sense  of  the  marvelous  intricacy  of  his  theme  ex- 
plains his  elaborate  presentation  of  the  community  life 
in  which  his  principal  figures  have  their  being.  He  is 
bent  upon  bringing  before  the  eye  of  the  reader  every 
scrap  of  evidence  that  may  be  conceived  of  as  rele- 
vant to  the  "  case."  The  reader  who  believes  that 
character  is  determined  mainly  by  inherited  physiologi- 
cal traits  finds  in  the  Five  Towns  novels  a  physiological 
account  of  three  successive  generations.  The  reader 
who  holds  that  education  is  the  significant  factor  is 
abundantly  supplied  with  the  educational  history  of 
father  and  children  and  grandchildren.  The  reader  who 
lays  stress  upon  a  changing  environment  and  the  pres- 
sure of  the  hour  sees  how  from  decade  to  decade  and 
from  year  to  year  the  hero  or  heroine  is  housed  and 
clothed  and  fed  and  occupied  and  amused ;  and  wrought 
upon  by  parents  and  children  and  relatives  and  friends 
and  servants  and  strangers;  and  subjected  to  the  influ- 
ences of  social  customs  and  business  and  politics  and 
religion  and  art  and  books  and  newspapers  transmitting 
to  the  thick  local  atmosphere  the  pressure  of  the  world 
outside.  The  reader  who  looks  for  the  main  currents  of 
the  nineteenth  century  in  the  Five  Towns  discovers  the 
Clayhanger  family  and  their  neighbors  developing  in 


REALISM  OF  ARNOLD  BENNETT       113 

relation  to  the  democratic  movement,  the  industrial  rev- 
olution, the  decay  of  dogmatic  theology,  the  extension 
of  scientific  thought  and  invention,  the  organization  of 
labor,  and  the  diffusion  of  aesthetic  consciousness. 
One's  first  impression  before  this  spectacle  is  of  admira- 
tion at  the  unrelenting  artistic  energy  which  keeps  this 
presented  community  life  whole  and  steady  and  yet  per- 
ceptibly in  motion  through  a  long  span  of  time. 

One's  second  impression  is  of  admiration  at  the  force 
of  composition  which  keeps  the  principal  figures  from 
being  "  swamped  "  in  the  life  of  the  community.  They 
are  immersed  in  it  and  dyed  in  it  and  warped  and  bat- 
tered and  grooved  by  it;  yet  they  are  never  made  to 
appear  as  its  impotent  creatures ;  somehow  they  are 
made  to  emerge  above  their  "  environment  "  as  its  cre- 
ators and  preservers — its  plain,  grim,  but  enduring 
heroes.  The  secret  of  this  "  somehow "  is  that  Mr. 
Bennett  implicitly  recognizes  as  an  artist  what  he  ex- 
plicitly declares  as  a  popular  philosopher,  namely,  the 
existence  in  the  individual  of  something  deeper  than  the 
body,  deeper  than  the  mind — an  ultimately  responsible, 
independent,  spiritual,  self  with  the  power  to  control, 
in  some  measure,  its  circumstances. 

In  his  preface  to  The  Old  Wives'  Tale  he  tells  us  that 
the  originating  impulse  of  that  work  was  a  conviction 
that  a  "  heartrending  novel "  might  be  written  to  ex- 
press "  the  extreme  pathos  in  the  fact  that  every  stout 
aging  woman  was  once  a  young  girl  with  the  unique 
charm  of  youth  in  her  form  and  movements  and  in  her 
mind."  The  theme  as  he  states  it  is  only  the  threadbare 
platitude  of  cavalier  poetry — the  deciduousness  of  phy- 


114     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

sical  beaut j ;  and  its  pathos  is  only  skin  deep.  But  the 
theme  as  he  develops  it  is  the  spiritual  truth  sung  by 
George  Herbert — "  only  a  sweet  and  virtuous  soul,  like 
seasoned  timber  never  gives  " ;  and  its  pathos  is  indeed 
heartrending.  Constance  and  Sophia,  the  two  heroines 
of  The  Old  Wives'  Tale,  appeal  to  tragic  compassion  not 
because  they  were  young  and  have  grown  old  and  gro- 
tesque but  because  they  hungered  for  life  and  love,  yet 
quietly  and  proudly  starved  in  their  respectability  rather 
than  touch  a  morsel  of  forbidden  food.  After  a  consid- 
erable course  of  reading  in  the  "  temperamental  "  novels 
of  the  naturalistic  school,  one  begins  to  feel  that  the  re- 
sisting power  of  formed  character  has  vanished  from  the 
earth.  I  shall  not  forget  the  sigh  of  relief  that  I  uttered 
when  I  came  upon  a  certain  passage  in  the  story  of 
Sophia's  resistance  to  the  various  invitations  of  Paris 
sensuality.  The  poor  girl  in  her  loneliness  craving  for 
sympathy  and  affection  finds  her  physical  and  mental  self 
responding  involuntarily  to  the  ardent  wooing  of  the 
kindly  Chirac.  " '  My  dear  friend,'  he  urges  with  un- 
daunted confidence,  '  you  must  know  that  I  love  you.' 
She  shook  her  head  impatiently,  all  the  time  wondering 
what  it  was  that  prevented  her  from  slipping  into  his 
arms."  She  does  not  slip  into  his  arms ;  and  one  rejoices 
— not  because  one's  moral  sense  is  gratified,  but  simply 
because  one  is  pleased  to  find  occasionally  a  novelist  who 
recognizes  the  inhibited  impulse,  in  the  sexual  connection, 
as  among  the  interesting  facts  of  life.  Mr.  Bennett  por- 
trays persons  with  various  powers  of  inhibition ;  but  he 
does  not  give  the  place  of  hero  or  heroine  to  a  slave  of 
instinct.  He  paints  an  abundance  of  unlovely  men  and 


REALISM  OF  ARNOLD  BENNETT       115 

women — hard,  shrewd,  smart,  selfish,  bigoted;  but  the 
interest  of  his  story  centers  in  the  deliberate  acts  of 
rational  beings,  who  are  conscious,  like  Hilda  Lessways, 
of  their  miraculous  power  "  to  create  all  their  future 
by  a  single  gesture,"  and  who  have  or  achieve  some  of 
the  substance  and  fixity  of  character.  By  the  very 
design  of  his  novels  Mr.  Bennett  reveals  his  admiration 
for  the  prudent,  foresighted,  purposeful  people.  The 
man  who  has  himself  in  hand  he  makes,  by  his  com- 
positional emphasis,  a  measure  of  the  subordinated 
figures. 

The  Clayhanger  trilogy,  triumphantly  completed  by 
the  publication  of  These  Twain,  expresses  with  the  mov- 
ing force  of  dramatic  representation  the  ideas  more 
simply  exposed  in  The  Plain  Man  and  His  Wife.  The 
first  volume  has  for  its  theme  the  development  of  the 
character  of  Edwin  Clayhanger  from  the  formlessness 
of  his  boyhood  to  the  steadiness,  honesty,  application, 
efficiency,  solidity,  tolerance,  justice,  and  self-control  of 
his  manhood.  The  theme  of  the  second  volume  is  the 
development  of  the  characters  of  Hilda  Lessways  from 
the  innocent,  ignorant  rebelliousness  and  rapturousness 
of  girlhood  through  a  brief  ill-advised  matrimonial  ad- 
venture to  the  vibrant,  hopeful,  open-eyed  egoism  and 
rather  grim  determination  of  early  womanhood.  The 
theme  of  the  third  volume  is  the  further  development  of 
this  "  dynamic  "  and  that  "  static  "  character  through 
the  difficult  and  at  times  almost  baffling  process  of  adapt- 
ing themselves  to  living  together  as  man  and  wife. 
Taken  together  the  three  novels  constitute  an  impressive 
dramatic  criticism  of  Mr.  Wells's  theory  of  the  life  of 


116     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

sustained  ecstasy  and,  if  you  please,  of  Mr.  Dreiser's 
theory  of  the  life  of  ruthless  animality. 

It  is  clear  that  Mr.  Bennett  has  attempted  to  present 
in  the  completed  trilogy  an  adequate  account  of  the 
fiery  conflict,  with  typical  antagonists,  of  the  Eternal- 
Feminine  and  the  Eternal-Masculine.  If  you  are  a  man, 
you  will  writhe,  or  you  ought  to  writhe,  at  the  exposure 
in  Edwin  of  your  own  obstinate  conviction  that  you 
think  straight  and  that  your  wife  does  not,  and  at  the 
exposure  of  your  hot  fits  of  indignation  at  her  shifty 
evasions  of  your  flawless  argument.  If  you  are  a  woman, 
you  will  blush,  or  ought  to  blush,  at  the  exposure  in 
Hilda  of  your  own  illogicality  and  your  willingness  to 
gain  ends — commendable  no  doubt — by  perfectly  un- 
scrupulous means.  Hilda  respects  and  loves  her  hus- 
band deeply,  but  she  is  irritated  by  his  colds,  by  his 
little  set  habits,  by  the  deliberateness  of  his  temper,  and 
by  the  inarticulateness  of  his  appreciation  of  her. 
Edwin  loves  his  wife  and  feels  the  charm  and  force  of 
her  personality;  but  he  distrusts  her  intellect  and  can- 
not entirely  approve  her  morality.  He  is  exasperated 
by  her  interference  in  his  business.  He  keenly  resents 
the  injustice  in  which  she  involves  him  through  acts 
inspired  by  her  ambition  for  him  and  by  her  passionate 
and  jealous  devotion  to  the  advancement  of  their  own 
family  interests.  She  develops  social  aspirations  in 
which  he  does  not  share,  and  a  desire  for  a  style  of  liv- 
ing which  promises  him  increased  burdens  with  no  added 
satisfaction.  Their  common  effort  seems  to  multiply 
luxuries  and  superficial  refinements  without  in  the  least 
sweetening  or  deepening  or  strengthening  their  spir- 


REALISM  OF  ARNOLD  BENNETT       117 

itual  intercourse.  He  tells  himself  in  a  moment  of 
intense  self-commiseration  that  the  great  complex  edifice 
of  his  business  "  with  its  dirt,  noise,  crudity,  strain,  and 
eternal  effort  "  exists  solely  that  Hilda  may  exist  "  in 
her  elegance,  her  disturbing  femininity,  her  restricted 
and  deep  affections,  her  irrational  capriciousness,  and 
her  strange,  brusque  commonsense."  He  asks  himself  in 
poignant  self-pity :  "  Where  do  I  come  in  ?  "  After 
repeated  scenes  of  domestic  tension  he  walks  out  of  his 
house  and  home  with  hot  brain  and  twitching  nerves. 
He  mutters  to  himself :  "  She  won't  alter  her  ways — and 
I  shan't  stand  them."  In  what  he  takes  for  ultimate 
despair,  he  says  to  himself,  "  as  millions  of  men  and 
women  have  said  to  themselves,  with  awestruck  calm: 
'  My  marriage  was  a  mistake.' ' 

But  as  this  plain,  average  man  wanders  aimlessly 
through  the  streets  of  the  Five  Towns  with  tumult  in 
his  breast,  confronting  the  ruin  of  his  private  universe, 
he  has  an  experience  comparable  in  character  and  in 
significance  to  him  with  that  of  Thomas  Carlyle  when  in 
sultry  Leith  Walk  he  authentically  took  the  Devil  by 
the  nose.  When  his  brain  cools  and  his  nerves  stop 
twitching  and  his  formed  character  returns  to  its  equi- 
librium, he  has  first  a  flashing  intuition  into  a  method 
by  which  he  can  reconcile  himself  to  his  "  universe." 
"  It  was  banal;  it  was  commonplace;  it  was  what  every 
one  knew.  Yet  it  was  the  great  discovery  of  all  his 
career.  If  Hilda  had  not  been  unjust  in  the  assertion  of 
her  own  individuality,  there  could  be  no  merit  in  yielding 
to  her.  ...  He  was  objecting  to  injustice  as  a  child 
objects  to  rain  on  a  holiday.  Injustice  was  a  tre- 


118     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

mendous  actuality!  It  had  to  be  faced  and  accepted. 
(He  himself  was  unjust.  At  any  rate  he  intellectually 
conceived  that  he  must  be,  though  honestly  he  could 
remember  no  instance  of  injustice  on  his  part.)  To 
reconcile  oneself  to  injustice  was  the  master  achieve- 
ment. .  .  .  He  yielded  on  the  canal-bridge.  And  in 
yielding,  it  seemed  to  him  that  he  was  victorious."  For, 
and  this  is  the  second  part  of  Edwin's  spiritual  experi- 
ence, in  the  instant  when  he  gains  the  wisdom  he  feels  in 
his  innermost  self  the  power  to  put  it  into  effect.  His 
joyous  sense  that  he  is  not  going  to  be  "  downed  "  by 
his  circumstances,  he  expresses  with  a  certain  crudity — 
perhaps  with  a  certain  vulgarity;  but  something  may 
be  forgiven  a  man  who  has  just  solved  the  "  problem  of 
marriage  " — "  I'm  not  going  to  be  beaten  by  Hilda ! 
And  I'm  not  going  to  be  beaten  by  marriage.  Dashed 
if  I  am !  A  nice  thing  if  I  had  to  admit  that  I  wasn't 
clever  enough  to  be  a  husband !  "  Clayhanger  does  not 
return  to  his  home  with  a  notion  that  his  discovery  will 
"  transform  marriage  into  an  everlasting  Eden."  He 
anticipates  further  trouble  and  further  sacrifices.  But 
he  has  found  content  by  accepting  discontent  as  a  condi- 
tion of  life,  and  by  honestly  endeavoring  to  adapt  his 
conduct  to  an  ideal.  In  his  recognition  of  the  need  of 
a  more  flexible  intelligence  and  a  stiffer  backbone  he 
embodies  at  once  the  principle  of  progress  and  the  prin- 
ciple of  conservation.  He  is  a  hero  of  his  generation, 
not  victorious  but  conquering.  He  cannot  stand  like 
Benham  in  The  Research  Magnificent,  and  say,  "  I  am  a 
Man.  The  Thought  of  the  world."  But  he  might 
stand,  if  he  had  the  habit  of  attitudinizing,  and  say, 


REALISM  OF  ARNOLD  BENNETT       119 

"  I  am  a  man.    A  vertebral  unit  in  the  backbone  of  the 
nation." 

One  cannot  plan  a  life  in  conventions  without  cutting 
out  of  it  many  wayward  desires  and  "  beautiful  im- 
pulses." The  young  lions  and  lionesses  of  radicalism  are 
forcing  the  question  upon  us  whether  one  can  plan  a  life 
in  beautiful  impulses  and  wayward  desires  without  cut- 
ting out  the  plan.  Mr.  Bennett  answers  in  the  negative, 
and  votes  for  preserving  the  plan.  I  do  not  undertake  to 
speak  critically  of  his  philosophy.  I  only  observe  that 
it  seems  to  support  an  altogether  decent  theory  of 
human  conduct.  And  this  in  turn  underlies  an  artistic 
representation  of  life  remarkable  for  its  fullness,  its 
energy,  its  gusto,  its  pathos,  its  play  of  tragic  and  comic 
lights,  its  dramatic  clashes,  its  catastrophes,  and  its 
reconciliations — in  short,  for  its  adequacy.  I  fear  that 
my  reasoning  will  not  make  much  impression  upon  the 
young,  for  the  young,  as  Mr.  Randolph  Bourne  tells  us, 
the  young  are  in  love  with  life;  and  to  accept  conven- 
tions is  to  refuse  life.  The  young  will  still  turn  to  Mr. 
Wells,  "  for  he,"  says  Miss  Rebecca  West — "  for  he  has 
inspired  the  young  to  demand  clear  thinking  and  intel- 
lectual passion  from  the  governing  classes,  instead  of  the 
sexual  regularity  which  was  their  one  virtue  and  which 
he  has  hinted  is  merely  part  of  a  general  slothfulness  and 
disinclination  for  adventure."  As  I  sadly  take  my  place 
in  the  rear  of  the  "  cretinous  butlers  "  who  "  do  not  like 
Mr.  Wells,"  I  summon  my  Christian  charity  to  declare 
that  much  shall  be  forgiven  a  champion  of  Mr.  Wells, 
whose  critical  arrows  go  singing,  like  this  sentence  of 
Rebecca  West's,  straight  to  the  heart  of  laughter. 


THE  AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF 
GEORGE  MOORE 

IT  is  now  about  forty  years  since  George  Moore,  not 
content  with  the  priestly  auditor  provided  by  his  Church, 
abandoned  the  private  confessional  and  began  to  pour 
along  the  town  the  secret  flood  of  his  ideas  and  emotions. 
How  could  he  have  done  otherwise?  Ireland  taught  his 
tongue  not  to  cleave  to  the  roof  of  his  mouth;  Roman 
Catholicism  taught  him  to  confess  his  sins;  Jean 
Jacques,  his  Delphian  Apollo,  taught  him  to  dulcify 
and  ventilate  them.  He  has  been  as  beguilingly  various 
in  the  moods  and  forms  of  his  personal  effusions  as  in 
the  matter  and  manner  of  his  ostensibly  objective  prose 
fiction.  Like  most  born  men  of  letters,  he  delivered  his 
first  message  to  the  world  in  verse — Flowers  of  Passion, 
1877.  In  Confessions  of  a  Young  Man,  1888,  he  adopts 
a  glittering,  paradoxical,  impudent  ruthless  air  befit- 
ting a  young  man  who  has  lived  in  Paris  and  passed 
through  all  the  illusions.  With  Memoirs  Of  My  Dead 
Life,  1906,  he  lowers  his  pitch,  softens  his  accents,  in- 
troduces a  note  of  pleased  satiety  and  gloating  languor 
proper  to  the  sensuous  reminiscences  of  later  middle-age. 
In  .the  three  volumes  of  Hail  and  Farewell,  1911-14,  he 
holds  our  attention  still  by  subtler  modulations  of  his 
malicious  revery,  by  a  studied  alteration  of  nakedness 

120 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     121 

and  filmy  sophistication  in  his  garb,  by  the  dreamy 
femininity  of  his  gesture,  by  the  lax  almost  unaccented 
movement  of  his  voice.  In  his  alluring  latest  manner, 
always  dulcet,  always  fluent,  he  has  laid  bare  a  person- 
ality compact  of  nearly  everything  that  is  detestable 
to  the  mind  of  a  plain  citizen  going  about  his  business  in 
the  marketplace.  He  has  confessed  consuming  egotism, 
quivering  sensibility,  fastidiousness,  vanity,  timidity, 
calculating  shamelessness,  sensuality,  a  streak  of  feline 
cruelty,  and  absolute  spiritual  incontinence.  Manet's 
portrait  of  him,  the  weird,  wide-eyed  face  veiled  in  wispy 
hair,  corresponds  to  his  own  unflattering  self-por- 
traiture :  an  elderly  Irish  satyr  fluting  among  the  reeds 
to  a  decadent  Irish  naiad,  and,  in  the  pauses  of  the 
fluting,  mingling  reminiscences  of  his  adventures,  artis- 
tic and  amatory,  with  the  notes  of  the  impressions  made 
by  the  fading  sunlight  upon  his  soul. 

Though  this  personality  possesses  a  certain  acrid 
bouquet  of  its  own,  it  challenges  our  attention  less  by 
its  uniqueness  than  by  its  representativeness.  Clearly 
enough  he  was  cast — if  anything  so  essentially  fluid 
can  be  said  to  have  been  cast — in  that  temperamental 
mold  which  Rousseau  idly  intimated  was  broken  up 
after  his  own  creation.  That  temperament  at  work 
in  contemporary  art  and  morals,  persisting  unaltered 
under  many  manifestations,  he  represents  with  remark- 
able consistency  and  completeness.  Purely  intellectual 
initiative  he  has  none:  but  he  has  been  swiftly  respon- 
sive to  every  new  influence  in  art  and  literature.  All 
his  life  he  has  lurked  in  the  purlieus  of  schools  and 
insinuated  himself  into  movements,  solicitating,  like  the 


122     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

barren  Calpurnia,  the  fructifying  touch  of  some  fleet 
clear-eyed  runner.  His  literary  liaisons  have  been  as 
facile  and  as  frequent  as  the  infatuations  of  George 
Sand.  He  has  succumbed  in  turn,  not  to  enter  into  par- 
ticulars, to  three  movements,  very  different  on  the  sur- 
face but  impelled  by  the  same  general  undercurrent :  he 
has  been  wooed,  won,  and  lost  by  "  aesthetism,"  natural- 
ism, and  the  symbolism  of  the  Irish  Renaissance.  Let 
us  trace  here  the  course  of  this  interesting  "  evolution." 

The  first  step  in  the  aesthetic  novitiate  is  the  prepa- 
ration of  the  self  for  its  own  independent  activity  by 
detaching  it  from  the  complex  organic  network  of  do- 
mestic, social,  racial,  national,  and  religious  relation- 
ships in  which  it  has  been  placed  by  the  irrelevant  acci- 
dent of  birth.  In  the  Confessions  of  a  Young  Man  Mr. 
Moore  dismissed  in  a  page  or  two  the  Ireland  of  his 
childhood.  The  reason  was  obvious :  it  had  nothing  to 
do  with  the  first  phase  of  his  literary  career.  From  the 
day  when  he  read  the  Sensitive  Plant  of  Shelley  "  by  the 
shores  of  a  pale  green  Irish  lake,"  he  was  destined  to 
shake  from  his  feet  the  dust  of  Ireland,  he  was  devoted 
to  art  and  letters,  and  dedicated  to  the  continuation  of 
Shelley's  terrible  mission — the  "  emancipation  "  of  the 
human  spirit. 

An  impressionable  Irishman  who  had  severed  all  nat- 
ural ties  could  easily  enough  in  the  early  'seventies  of 
the  last  century,  have  become  a  perfect  aesthete  in  Eng- 
land. The  spring  had  come  slowly  up  that  way,  but 
at  last  it  had  definitely  announced  itself.  Rossetti, 
having  struck  the  note  of  intensity  in  painting  and 
poetry,  had  gone  on  to  the  collection  of  blue  china  and 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     123 

Japanese  bric-a-brac.  In  1870  William  Morris  com- 
pleted The  Earthly  Paradise.  Ruskin  in  the  same  year 
began  to  lecture  on  art  at  Oxford,  teaching — to  be  sure, 
from  his  own  high  ethical  standpoint — the  pregnant 
doctrine  that  taste  is  morality.  In  1873  Pater  put 
forth  his  seductive  studies  in  the  art  and  poetry  of  the 
Renaissance,  setting  up  the  aesthetic  ideal  in  Mona 
Lisa,  committing  to  posterity  the  aesthetic  testament 
in  the  famous  Conclusion.  Before  the  end  of  the  decade 
Moore's  fellow-countryman  Wilde  was  delighting  his 
circle,  shocking  the  burgesses,  and  achieving  notoriety 
by  brilliant  paradoxes  and  the  hard  gem-like  beauties 
of  strange  verse.  In  ten  years  the  aesthetic  movement 
had  run  its  swift  course  through  beauty  to  intensity 
and  thence  to  perverseness ;  and  it  had  produced  an 
effective  school  for  the  transformation  of  English 
youths  into  sun-flowered  Corinthian  dandies. 

Of  this  Oxford  aestheticism  Mr.  Moore  felt  the  influ- 
ence in  due  season,  but  he  somewhat  anticipated  its 
effects  by  crossing  the  Channel  to  France,  and  at  once 
immersing  his  divested  soul  in  the  Lethe  of  an  alien  art. 
There  he  was  gradually  born  again  in  the  Ptolemaic 
world  of  the  Latin  Quarter,  in  the  free  society  of  the 
temporarily  and  permanently  untied,  in  an  atmosphere 
of  smoke  bounded  by  an  horizon  of  canvas.  There  the 
deracinated  Irishman  assumed  the  language  and  the 
pleasures  of  the  Parisian  without  assuming  his  responsi- 
bilities, lived  in  bachelor  apartments  surrounded  with 
rare  books,  old  furniture,  and  fantastic  curios ;  rose  at 
noon  and  retired  at  daybreak,  and  maintained  a  model 
and  a  python — the  latter  daily  propitiated  with  guinea- 


ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

pigs.  Mistresses  and  pythons,  cameos  and  sphinxes — 
these  were  the  themes  of  his  favorite  poets  and  ro- 
mancers, representatives  of  an  older  than  the  English 
aestheticism  and  potent  contributors  to  it — Gautier  and 
Baudelaire,  Banville  and  Verlaine.  In  the  unreal  world 
of  the  studios  which  he  haunted,  Bohemian  dreamers 
were  painting  dancing  girls  borrowed  from  the  unreal 
world  of  the  stage,  Aphrodites  rising  from  the  sea, 
Harlequins  and  Columbines.  In  this  little  eccentric 
planet  where  the  problems  of  good  and  evil  resolved 
themselves  into  questions  of  green  and  gold,  light  and 
shadow,  line  and  mass,  pleasure  and  pain,  Mr.  Moore 
seems  to  have  learned  all  the  morality  that  he  has  ever 
practiced  or  advocated. 

After  a  sojourn  in  Paris  so  long  that  he  almost  forgot 
the  idiomatic  use  of  English,  he  returned  to  England, 
an  appetent  and  ambitious  ego,  in  time  to  catch  the 
aesthetic  movement  of  the  late  'seventies.  In  1877, 
synchronizing  with  Oscar  Wilde's  arrival  as  a  poet,  he 
published  his  first  book,  of  which  the  title,  Flowers  of 
Passion,  sufficiently  indicates  the  character  and  the 
literary  inspiration.  He  followed  this  up  in  1881  with 
Pagan  Poems,  and  for  several  years  to  come  diverted 
himself  as  a  journalist,  critic  of  art,  realistic  novelist, 
and  fop.  The  experiences  and  the  spirit  of  the  aes- 
thetic period  are  adequately  represented  in  Confessions 
of  a  Young  Man.  As  there  was  nothing  novel  in  the 
processes  by  which  Mr.  Moore  was  turned  out  an 
aesthete,  so  there  was  nothing  novel  in  the  product. 
The  compact  gospel  of  aesthetic  egotism  unfolded  by 
his  Young  Man  in  1888,  France  had  received  from 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     125 

Gautier  and  Baudelaire  twenty  to  fifty  years  earlier. 
Mr.  Moore's  originality  consisted  merely  in  carrying 
Parisian  "  aestheticism  " — the  corrupt  leavings  of  the 
Romantic  Movement — across  the  Channel,  and  offering 
it  to  the  Anglo-Saxon  world.  Let  us  have  a  few  jewels 
from  the  monument  which  he  raised  to  eternalize  his 
youth  : 

My  father's  death  freed  me,  and  I  sprang  like  a  loosened 
bough  up  to  the  light.  His  death  gave  me  power  to  create 
myself,  that  is  to  say,  to  create  a  complete  and  absolute  self 
out  of  the  partial  self  which  was  all  the  restraint  of  home 
had  permitted;  this  future  self,  this  ideal  George  Moore, 
beckoned  me,  lured  me  like  a  ghost;  and  as  I  followed  the 
funeral  the  question,  Would  I  sacrifice  this  ghostly  self,  if 
by  so  doing  I  should  bring  my  father  back  ?  presented  itself 
without  intermission,  and  I  shrank  horrified  at  the  answer 
which  I  could  not  crush  out  of  mind. 

Art  was  not  for  us  then  as  it  is  now, — a  mere  emotion, 
right  or  wrong  only  in  proportion  to  its  intensity. 

I  am  feminine,  morbid,  perverse.  But  above  all  perverse, 
almost  everything  perverse  interests  me,  fascinates  me. 

I  could  not  understand  how  anybody  could  bring  himself 
to  acknowledge  the  vulgar  details  of  our  vulgar  age.  The 
fiery  glory  of  Jose  de  Heredia,  on  the  contrary,  filled  me 
with  enthusiasm — ruins  and  sand,  shadow  and  silhouette  of 
palms  and  pillars,  negroes,  crimson,  swords,  silence,  and 
arabesques. 

Two  dominant  notes  in  my  character — an  original  hatred 
of  my  native  country,  and  a  brutal  loathing  of  the  religion  I 
was  brought  up  in. 

A  little  bourgeois  comfort,  a  little  bourgeois  sense  of 
right,  cry  the  moderns.  Hither  the  world  has  been  drifting 
since  the  coming  of  the  pale  socialist  of  Galilee:  and  this  is 
why  I  hate  Him,  and  deny  His  divinity.  ...  I,  who  hold 


126     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

nought  else  pitiful,  pity  Thee,  Thy  bleeding  face  and  hands 
and  feet,  Thy  hanging  body;  Thou  at  least  art  pictur- 
esque. .  .  . 

The  healthy  school  is  played  out  in  England:  all  that 
could  be  said  has  been  said. 

What  care  I  that  some  millions  of  wretched  Israelites 
died  under  Pharaoh's  lash  or  Egypt's  sun?  It  was  well 
that  they  died  that  I  might  have  the  pyramids  to  look  on, 
or  to  fill  a  musing  hour  with  wonderment. 

I  am  ashamed  of  nothing  I  have  done,  especially  my  sins, 
and  I  boldly  confess  that  I  have  desired  notoriety. 

Humanity  is  a  pigsty,  where  liars,  hypocrites,  and  the 
obscene  in  spirit  congregate:  and  it  has  been  so  since  the 
great  Jew  conceived  it,  and  it  will  be  so  till  the  end.  Far 
better  the  blithe  modern  pagan  in  his  white  tie  and  evening 
clothes,  and  his  facile  philosophy.  He  says:  "  I  don't  care 
how  the  poor  live;  my  only  regret  is  that  they  live  at  all," 
and  he  gives  the  beggar  a  shilling. 

In  this  year  of  grace  these  glowing  Neronics  no  longer 
make  us  shudder;  they  are  happily  beginning  to  make 
us  yawn.  The  sickly  little  poetasters  in  America  who 
have  attempted  in  recent  years  to  dish  this  decayed 
pottage  up  again  are  even  from  a  merely  aesthetic  point 
of  view  beneath  mention  and  beneath  contempt.  If  any- 
thing is  dead,  the  aesthetic  movement  that  took  shape 
in  the  'seventies  is  dead.  The  sphinxes  and  the  green 
carnations,  the  flowers  of  passion  and  the  ballads  in  blue 
china,  already  associate  themselves  in  memory  with  the 
stucco  and  the  stuffed  birds  of  an  elder  decorative 
scheme.  To  burn  always  with  a  hard,  gem-like  flame 
before  a  masterpiece  of  the  Italian  Renaissance  no 
longer  epitomizes  for  the  younger  generation,  "  success 
in  life."  Where  are  the  aesthetes  of  yesteryear  ?  Where 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     127 

are  our  Oscar  Wildes  and  Ernest  Dowsons  and  Aubrey 
Beardsleys?  Where  are  the  authors  and  illustrators  of 
the  Yellow  Book  and  the  Savoy?  Early  death  made 
havoc  in  their  ranks,  Socialism  distracted  the  younger 
generation,  fresh  pastures  invited  them.  They  have  left 
the  banks  of  their  Dead  Sea  desolate.  Somewhat  in 
advance  of  the  general  exodus,  Mr.  Moore's  prescient 
nostrils  perceived  a  fetid  odor  rising  from  the  waters, 
and  he  took  refuge  among  the  "  naturalists,"  or,  as  he 
called  them  in  those  days,  the  "  realists." 

It  may  appear  at  first  thought  a  far  cry  from  feeding 
guinea-pigs  to  pythons,  and  indulging  in  Neronic  mus- 
ings on  the  Egyptian  pyramids,  to  writing  a  realistic 
novel  of  life  in  the  slums  of  London.  As  aesthete,  Mr. 
Moore  had  declared  that  he  did  not  care  how  the  poor 
lived.  In  1894,  as  realistic  novelist,  he  brought  out 
Esther  Waters,  the  intimate  life  history  of  an  illiterate 
servant-girl  who  in  the  course  of  her  squalid  existence 
spent  some  time  in  the  poor-house.  If  the  author's  con- 
fession did  not  belie  the  suggestion,  we  might  infer  that 
a  great  change  had  come  over  him.  Knowing  him  as  we 
do,  we  are  not  permitted  to  conjecture  that  his  contempt 
for  the  lower  classes  has  dissolved  in  compassion  for  the 
poor.  We  must  seek  for  the  point  of  view  from  which  an 
English  scullery  maid  can  be  made  to  yield  artistic  sat- 
isfaction equivalent  to  that  formerly  yielded  by  the  per- 
fumed lady  of  romance. 

We  may  approach  the  question  by  remarking  that  this 
point  of  view  had  been  discovered  by  several  of  Mr. 
Moore's  masters  in  fiction — by  Balzac,  Maupassant, 
and,  notably,  Flaubert.  That  relentless  lover  of  le  mot 


128     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

unique  occupies  in  French  literature  a  position  closely 
corresponding  to  that  occupied  by  Mr.  Moore  in  Eng- 
lish: he  is  the  link  between  the  romanticists  and  the 
realists.  Frenchman  and  Irishman  were  temperament- 
ally akin;  open  the  Education  Sentimentale,  and  through 
page  after  page  you  will  feel  as  if  you  were  in  the  pres- 
ence of  an  earlier  version  of  Mr.  Moore's  memoirs. 
Formed  in  the  intensely  aesthetic  school  of  Gautier  and 
Baudelaire,  Flaubert,  like  the  Young  Man,  held  that  the 
only  virtue  is  perfection  of  form.  Fundamentally  en- 
grossed in  sex,  he,  too,  craved  refinement  in  the  seduc- 
tion of  the  senses — the  intoxication  of  perfumes,  the 
allurement  of  lace,  religious  veilings,  Oriental  coloring, 
barbaric  splendors.  Finally,  he,  too,  abhorred  and  de- 
spised the  Philistine  and  all  his  virtues.  Salammbo,  La 
Tentation  de  Saint  Antoine,  Herodias — such  are  the 
works  one  should  expect  from  a  man  of  his  romantic 
origins.  Why,  then,  does  this  great  romantic  artist 
bend  all  his  talents  to  the  portrayal  of  the  bourgeois  life 
of  Madame  Bovary,  depraved  wife  of  a  stupid  country 
doctor?  Why,  then,  does  this  despiser  of  the  vulgar 
herd  cause  to  be  bound  up  in  the  same  volume  with 
Herodias,  the  tale  of  an  ignorant,  sensual,  long-suffering 
servant-girl  (Un  Coeur  Simple),  obviously  related  to 
Esther  Waters? 

Upon  this  peculiar  transition  from  romanticism  to 
realism  Mr.  Moore  throws  a  luminous  beam  in  several 
passages  of  his  works  commenting  upon  an  artistic  inno- 
vation of  Degas.  To  this  original  painter,  a  man  of 
penetrating  intellect,  belongs,  according  to  our  author, 
the  credit  for  discovering  that  the  nude  was  becoming 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     129 

well-nigh  incapable  of  artistic  treatment.  To  him  be- 
longs also  the  credit  for  the  discovery  of  a  method  for 
rehabilitating  the  nude.  The  formula  is  novelty  through 
cynicism.  Having  asked  the  rhetorical  question,  "  Who 
in  sheer  beauty  has  a  new  word  to  say?  "  Degas  sent  for 
a  butcher's  fat  wife,  and  requested  her  to  pose  for  him. 
Following  the  clue  of  ugliness,  Degas  escaped  from  the 
tedious  palace  of  romantic  art  into  a  new  world  of  vivid 
sensations.  Mr.  Moore's  delight  with  the  results  he 
has  expressed  in  Confessions  of  a  Young  Man,  in  Im- 
pressions and  Opinions,  1891,  and  again  in  the  first  vol- 
ume of  Hail  and  Farewell,  1911.  The  following  passage 
is  from  Impressions  and  Opinions: 

Three  coarse  women,  middle-aged  and  deformed  by  toil, 
are  perhaps  the  most  wonderful.  One  sponges  herself  in  a 
tin  bath:  another  passes  a  rough  nightdress  over  her  lumpy 
shoulders,  and  the  touching  ugliness  of  this  poor  human 
creature  goes  straight  to  the  heart.  A  woman  who  has 
stepped  out  of  a  bath  examines  her  arm.  Degas  says,  La 
bete  humaine  qui  s'occupe  d'elle-meme;  une  chatte  qui  se 
leche.  Yes,  it  is  the  portrayal  of  the  animal  life  of  the 
human  being,  the  animal  conscious  of  nothing  but  itself. 

How  superbly  these  figures  stand  forth  in  the  hard 
clear  light  of  contempt !  George  Eliot  digressed  in  a 
familiar  passage  in  Adam  Bede  to  protest  against  the 
exclusion  from  art  of  Dutch  subjects — "  old  women 
scraping  carrots  with  their  work-worn  hands  .  .  . 
rounded  backs  and  stupid,  weather-beaten  faces  that 
have  bent  over  the  spade  and  done  the  rough  work  of  the 
world."  But  George  Eliot  did  not  find  it  necessary  to 
strip  her  old  women  or  peep  at  them  through  a  keyhole ; 


it  was  not  their  essential  animality  but  their  essential 
humanity  that  attracted  her;  and  the  kindly  light  which 
fills  her  pictures  is  that  light  of  moral  sympathy  and 
love  which  irradiates  the  bowed  head  of  Wordsworth's 
leech-gatherer.  A  man  detached  from  his  species  like 
Mr.  Moore  defends  the  ugly  in  art  on  entirely  different 
grounds.  Aesthetically  very  piquant  indeed !  As  "  pic- 
turesque," when  your  eyes  have  been  opened  to  it, 
as  the  crucifixion  of  Christ !  That,  so  far  as  he  is  con- 
cerned, is  a  sufficient  justification  of  naturalism. 

Mr.  Moore  has  profited  by  the  lessons  of  Degas. 
How  he  probed  into  the  animal  life  of  his  laundress  when 
he  was  writing  Esther  Waters  he  has  related  with  gusto. 
How  in  that  novel  he  opened  the  door  upon  the  physical 
terrors  of  childbirth  the  reader  may  determine  for  him- 
self, if  he  is  not  already  satiated  with  the  innumerable 
morbid  and  hysterical  representations  of  later  writers. 
Moore's  aesthetic  zest  in  the  repulsive  he  has  carried 
over  into  the  sentimentalities  of  his  memoirs,  employing 
quite  habitually  a  dash  of  the  disgusting  as  a  sauce 
piquante  to  intensify  the  sweetness  of  his  reveries.  If  it 
were  possible  for  him  to  make  a  perfectly  straightfor- 
ward explanation  of  his  use  of  the  nauseous,  he  would 
tell  us  just  this:  It  is  an  aesthetic  novelty.  But  when 
an  aesthete  introduces  an  indecency  in  the  Anglo-Saxon 
world,  he  still  hesitates  a  little  to  admit  that  it  is  intro- 
duced merely  to  furnish  a  new  sensation.  He  assumes 
for  the  moment  the  air  of  the  veracious  and  dispassion- 
ate historian ;  he  says  with  a  false  appearance  of  candor : 
It  is  a  fact  of  civilization.  A  good  illustration  of  this 
pseudo-scientific  pose  of  the  artist  may  be  seen  in  this 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     131 

record  of  his  observation  of  a  house-maid  in  Confessions 
of  a  Young  Man: 

Emma,  I  remember  you — you  are  not  to  be  forgotten — up 
at  five  o'clock  every  morning,  scouring,  washing,  cooking, 
dressing  those  infamous  children;  seventeen  hours  at  least 
out  of  the  twenty- four  at  the  beck  and  call  of  landlady, 
lodgers,  and  quarreling  children;  seventeen  hours  at  least 
cut  of  the  twenty-four  drudging  in  that  horrible  kitchen, 
running  upstairs  with  coals  and  breakfasts  and  cans  of  hot 
water;  down  on  your  knees  before  a  grate,  pulling  out  the 
cinders  with  those  hands — can  I  call  them  hands?  The 
lodgers  sometimes  threw  you  a  kind  word,  but  never  one 
that  recognized  that  you  were  akin  to  us,  only  the  pity  that 
might  be  extended  to  a  dog.  And  I  used  to  ask  you  all 
sorts  of  cruel  questions;  I  was  curious  to  know  the  depth 
of  animalism  you  had  sunk  to,  or  rather  out  of  which  you 
had  been  raised.  And  generally  you  answered  innocently 
and  naively  enough.  But  sometimes  my  words  were  too 
crude,  and  they  struck  through  the  thick  hide  into  the  quick, 
into  the  human,  and  you  winced  a  little ;  but  this  was  rarely, 
for  you  were  nearly,  oh,  very  nearly  an  animal;  your  tem- 
perament and  intelligence  were  just  those  of  a  dog  that  has 
picked  up  a  master,  not  a  real  master,  but  a  makeshift 
master  who  may  turn  it  out  any  moment.  Dickens  would 
sentimentalize  or  laugh  over  you;  I  do  neither.  I  merely 
recognize  you  as  one  of  the  facts  of  civilization. 

The  last  sentence,  being  interpreted,  means,  "  I  merely 
aestheticize  over  you."  The  kinship  with  Degas  extends 
below  the  surface.  Mr.  Moore's  work  is  conceived  and 
produced  in  a  cynical  contempt  for  humanity — a  con- 
tempt which  he  had  fed  and  fattened  from  every  avail- 
able source.  From  Baudelaire,  Degas,  and  Zola  he 
derived  his  conception  of  the  aesthetic  possibilities  of 


132     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

the  human  beast ;  and  Zola  gave  him  the  formula,  natur- 
alisme,  la  verite,  la  science.  These  direct  literary  and 
artistic  influences  were  reinforced  in  the  'eighties  by 
some  acquaintance  with  the  pessimistic  philosophy  of 
Schopenhauer  and  of  Eduard  von  Hartmann,  which  in 
this  same  period  was  shaping  the  cynical  spirit  of 
Samuel  Butler.  A  Teutonic-Oriental  nihilism  was  about 
the  most  perverse  and  blighting  spirit  then  abroad  in 
the  land;  accordingly  Mr.  Moore  embraced  it,  and  did 
what  he  could  to  propagate  it.  "  That  I  may  die  child- 
less," exclaims  his  Young  Man,  "  that  when  my  hour 
comes  I  may  turn  my  face  to  the  wall  saying,  I  have  not 
increased  the  great  evil  of  human  life — then,  though  I 
were  a  murderer,  fornicator,  thief,  and  liar,  my  sins 
shall  melt  even  as  a  cloud.  But  he  who  dies  with  chil- 
dren about  him,  though  his  life  were  in  all  else  an  excel- 
lent deed,  shall  be  held  accursed  by  the  truly  wise,  and 
the  stain  upon  him  shall  endure  forever."  His  convic- 
tion that  existence  is  an  evil  is  modified  by  a  conviction 
that  existence  may  be  made  fairly  savory  by  an  artist 
with  plenty  of  money  who  rids  himself  of  Christianity, 
his  conscience,  and  his  humanitarian  sympathies,  and 
with  nicely  calculating  selfishness  gratifies  his  natural 
impulses. 

Mr.  Moore  is  an  accomplished  literary  artist :  that  is 
to  say,  he  is  a  master  of  the  means  necessary  to  produce 
the  effects  which  he  preconceives.  Lewis  Seymour  in 
A  Modern  Lover,  Mr.  Moore's  first  novel  published  in 
1883,  is  an  eloquently  cynical  representation  of  the 
successful  Victorian  artist,  flowering  in  the  studios, 
boudoirs,  and  ball-rooms  of  the  late  'seventies.  "  Lewis," 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     133 

says  the  historian  with  a  grimace,  "  believed  in  passion, 
eternal  devotion,  and,  above  all,  fidelity;  he  could  not 
understand  the  sin  of  unfaithfulness,  in  any  shape  or 
form;  without  truth,  there  could  not  be  love,  and  how 
any  man  could  make  love  to  his  friend's  wife,  passed  his 
comprehension."  So  much  for  the  Victorian  ideality. 
Lewis,  like  the  hero  of  Maupassant's  Bel  Ami,  lives 
mentally  and  physically  at  the  expense  of  the  numerous 
women  whom  he  captivates ;  he  flirts  with  his  models ;  he 
goes  up  the  aisle  of  the  church  in  which  he  is  married 
past  pews  full  of  the  ladies  with  whom  he  has  been  inti- 
mate ;  in  the  days  of  his  honeymoon  his  bride  discovers 
upon  his  finger  a  diamond  ring  sent  to  him  by  a  married 
mistress ;  he  prospers  exceedingly,  and  is  elected  to  the 
Academy.  So  much  for  the  Victorian  reality.  If  you 
exclaim,  "  This  is  mere  caricature,"  Mr.  Moore  replies 
in  the  Confessions  that  "  the  whole  "  of  his  own  "  moral 
nature  is  reflected  in  Lewis  Seymour." 

As  a  foil  to  Lewis  as  artist,  he  introduces  a  group  of 
"  realist  "  painters  who  are  sick  of  sentiment  and  the 
"  conventional  prettiness  of  things."  They  can  put  up 
with  the  sentiment  of  Swinburne's  leper,  because  the  sub- 
ject is  fresh  and  unhackneyed.  Instead  of  occupying 
themselves,  like  Sir  Frederick  Leighton,  for  example,  with 
"  graceful  nymphs  languishing  on  green  banks,  either 
nude  or  in  classical  draperies,"  they  paint  "  housemaids 
in  print  dresses,  leaning  out  of  windows,  or  bar-girls 
serving  drinks  to  beery-looking  clerks."  This  they  de- 
clare is  the  "positivism  of  art,"  and  they  rejoice  that 
they  have  achieved  an  art  in  accord  with  the  philosophy 
of  the  age.  Mr.  Moore's  entire  picture  of  society  in 


A  Modern  Lover  is  a  contribution  to  the  new  "  realism." 
It  is  an  exhibit  offered  in  support  of  the  thesis  of  the 
Restoration  dramatists,  that  every  man  is  a  sensualist 
and  every  woman  a  rake.  The  thesis  is  proved  by  the 
simple  Restoration  device  of  representing  every  pro- 
fessed allegiance  to  ideal  standards  as  a  hollow  sham. 

His  second  novel,  A  Mummer's  Wife,  1884,  "  reeks  " 
more  powerfully  of  actuality  than  any  other  of  his  works 
before  Esther  Waters;  but  its  special  interest  is  still 
more  or  less  "  theoretical."  It  is  an  exhibit  offered  in 
support  of  a  thesis  selected  from  Duruy's  L'lntroduc- 
tion  Generate  a  VHistoire  de  France:  "  Change  the  sur- 
roundings in  which  a  man  lives,  and  in  two  or  three  gen- 
erations, you  will  have  changed  his  physical  constitu- 
tion, his  habits  of  life,  and  a  goodly  number  of  his 
ideas."  The  novel  is  a  kind  of  English  "  transposition  " 
of  Madame  Bovaryt  flavored  with  a  handful  of  something 
of  Zola's.  Kate  Ede,  the  soft,  good-natured,  respectable 
wife  of  a  horribly  asthmatic  shopkeeper  whose  physical 
agonies  are  rendered  with  disgusting  closeness,  escapes 
mentally  from  the  humdrum  of  her  shop  and  sewing- 
room  by  reading  sentimental  poetry  and  cheap  romantic 
novels.  It  never  occurs  to  her  to  make  any  attempt  to 
realize  her  romantic  dreams  till  a  traveling  theatrical 
company  visits  the  town,  and  a  gross  but  amiable  actor 
is  lodged  in  her  house.  She  brings  him  hot  water  in  the 
morning  and  serves  him  his  breakfasts  ;  they  chat  at  odd 
moments  and  surreptitiously  visit  a  crockery  factory; 
after  a  few  meetings  and  facile  embraces  in  dark  hall- 
ways, she  runs  away  with  him  and  travels  with  the 
troupe.  Her  good-humored  fat-legged  companion — the 


fat  legs  and  good  humor  are  about  the  only  notes  of 
his  character — treats  her  kindly,  and  obligingly  marries 
her;  but  under  the  new  Bohemian  influences  Kate's 
respectability  disintegrates,  she  begins  to  tipple,  she 
becomes  morbidly  jealous  and  furiously  quarrelsome, 
and  she  dies  in  squalid  and  nauseating  dipsomania. 
As  a  study  in  mental  and  physical  dissolution  A  Mum- 
mer's Wife  is  wonderfully  impressive.  The  analysis 
and  the  representation  of  drunken  female  rage  are 
beyond  praise.  The  total  emotional  effect  upon  the 
reader  resembles  that  of  an  intense  sea-sickness — a  some- 
what novel  aesthetic  effect.  With  notable  self-restraint, 
Mr.  Moore  in  this  case  strives  for  a  hard,  clear,  dry 
objectivity.  He  offers  no  moral  conclusion;  so  that  the 
orthodox  moralist  is  at  liberty  to  say,  Here  is  a  stinging 
illustration  of  the  consequences  of  drink  and  adultery. 
But  if  there  is  any  sincerity  in  Mr.  Moore's  personal 
writings,  we  may  be  sure  that,  if  called  upon,  he  would 
moralize  the  tale  in  some  such  fashion  as  this :  Don't  go 
in  for  the  fast  life  if  you  haven't  the  stamina  to  stand 
the  pace. 

To  introduce  such  a  moral  as  this  into  the  book  would 
spoil  Mr.  Moore's  aesthetic  effect.  He  does  not  intend 
here  to  present  his  gospel  of  enlightened  egotism.  He 
desires  only  to  convey  to  the  reader  his  sense  of  the  dull 
pathos  of  things — his  contemptuous  pity  for  humanity ; 
and  he  marvellously  well  understands  how  to  do  it. 
There  is  page  after  page  as  poignant  as  this  description 
of  Kate  in  her  rapid  decline : 

She  had  a  box  in  which  she  kept  her  souvenirs.     They 


136     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

were  a  curious  collection.  A  withered  flower,  a  broken 
cigarette-holder,  two  or  three  old  buttons  that  had  fallen 
from  his  clothes,  and  a  lock  of  hair.  But  it  was  underneath 
these  that  lay  the  prize  of  prizes — a  string  of  false  pearls. 
Never  did  she  see  this  precious  relic  without  trembling,  and 
to  put  it  round  her  neck  for  a  few  minutes  after  her  lonely 
dinner  when  she  was  waiting  for  him  to  come  home,  charmed 
and  softened  her  as  nothing  else  did.  It  was  a  necklace 
she  had  to  wear  in  a  comedietta  they  had  both  played  in, 
The  Lover's  Knot.  Well  did  she  remember  the  day  they 
had  gone  to  buy  it  together ;  it  had  been  one  of  the  happiest 
in  her  life.  But  it  was  precisely  the  reaction  caused  by 
these  moments  of  tenderness  that  was  terrible  to  witness. 
Gradually  from  looks  of  dreamy  happiness  the  face  would 
become  clouded,  and  as  bitter  thoughts  of  wrongs  done  her 
surged  up  in  her  mind,  the  tiny  nostril  would  dilate  and 
the  upper  lip  contract,  until  the  white  canine  tooth  was 
visible.  For  ten  minutes  more  she  would  remain,  her  hands 
grasping  nervously  at  the  arms  of  her  chair:  by  that  time 
the  paroxysm  would  have  obtained  complete  mastery  over 
her,  and  with  her  brain  deaf  and  cold  as  stone  she  would 
walk  across  the  room  to  where  the  liquor  was  kept,  and 
moodily  sipping  gin-and-water,  she  would  form  plans  as 
to  how  she  would  attack  him  when  he  arrived  home. 

In  A  Drama  in  Muslin,  1886,  Mr.  Moore  sets  himself 
a  more  complex  task  than  he  undertakes  in  A  Mummer's 
Wife,  and  his  treatment  of  this  theme  is  intensely  per- 
sonal. He  paints  here  on  a  fairly  wide  canvas  Irish 
social  life  in  town  and  country  in  the  days  of  the  Land 
League.  His  central  characters  are  four  or  five  girls 
belonging  to  various  country  families,  who  have  just 
completed  their  education  in  a  convent  and  are  now  to 
be  provided  with  husbands  and  careers.  The  spirit  in 
which  Mr.  Moore  approaches  his  subject  I  have  already 


indicated  by  a  quotation  from  his  nearly  contempo- 
raneous Confessions :  "  Two  dominant  notes  in  my  char- 
acter— an  original  hatred  of  my  native  country,  and  a 
brutal  loathing  of  the  religion  I  was  brought  up  in." 
Let  us  supplement  this  with  another  passage  from  the 
same  source,  indicating  his  attitude  toward  the  popular 
discontent  in  Ireland  which  threatened  to  cut  off  his 
revenues  and  forced  his  return  from  Paris — a  passage 
breathing  the  spirit  of  the  Nietzschean  HerrenmordL 
and  the  German  invasion  of  Belgium: 

That  some  wretched  farmers  should  refuse  to  starve, 
that  I  may  not  be  deprived  of  my  demi-tasse  at  Tortoni's, 
that  I  may  not  be  forced  to  leave  this  beautiful  retreat,  my 
cat  and  my  python — monstrous.  And  these  wretched  crea- 
tures will  find  moral  support  in  England;  they  will  find 
pity!  Pity,  that  most  vile  of  all  virtues,  has  never  been 
known  to  me.  The  great  pagan  world  I  love  knew  it  not. 
Now  the  world  proposes  to  interrupt  the  terrible  austere 
laws  of  nature  which  ordain  that  the  weak  shall  be  tram- 
pled upon,  shall  be  ground  into  death  and  dust,  that  the 
strong  shall  be  really  strong, — that  the  strong  shall  be 
glorious,  sublime. 

Mr.  Moore's  problem,  then,  is  to  make  his  picture  of 
Irish  society  express  adequately  his  contempt  for  it — 
and,  incidentally,  for  humanity  in  general.  I  will  enu- 
merate and  illustrate  some  of  the  means  by  which  he 
accomplishes  his  end. 

In  the  first  place  he  makes  his  characters  creatures 
of  heredity  and  environment,  according  to  the  naturalis- 
tic formula;  and  he  insists  with  brutal  emphasis  upon 
physiological  structure  as  the  determining  element  in 


138     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

their  behavior.    How  explicit  his  shallow  pseudo-sciene,, 
becomes  may  be  illustrated  by  the  following  paragraph : 

Alice  Barton's  power  to  judge  between  right  and  wrong, 
her  love  of  sentiment,  her  collectedness,  yes,  I  will  say  her 
reasoned  collectedness  were,  as  has  been  partially  shown, 
the  consequence  of  the  passivity  of  the  life  and  nature  of 
her  grandfather  (the  historian);  her  power  of  will,  and  her 
clear,  concise  intelligence  were  inherited  from  her  mother, 
and  these  qualities  being  placed  in  a  perfectly  healthy  sub- 
ject, a  subject  in  whom  every  organ  functioned  admirably, 
the  result  was  a  mind  that  turned  instinctively  from  mystic- 
ism and  its  adjuncts.  .  .  .  And  Cecilia's  dark  and  illogical 
mind  can  also  be  accounted  for,  her  hatred  of  all  that  con- 
cerned sexual  passion  was  consequent  on  her  father's  age 
and  her  mother's  loathing  for  him  during  conception  and 
pregnancy;  and  then,  if  it  be  considered  that  this  trans- 
mitted hatred  was  planted  and  left  to  germinate  in  a  mis- 
shapen body,  it  will  be  understood  how  a  weird  love  of  the 
spiritual,  of  the  mystical,  was  the  almost  inevitable  psychical 
characteristic  that  a  human  being  born  under  such  circum- 
stances would  possess. 

The  conduct  of  each  of  the  young  girls  is  deduced 
from  the  shape  of  her  limbs,  the  color  of  her  eyes  and 
hair,  her  complexion,  and  other  carefully  enumerated 
physical  marks.  From  Alice  Barton's  "  thin  arms  and 
straight  hips  and  shoulders  "  Mr.  Moore  proves  her 
"  natural  powerlessness  to  do  aught  but  live  up  to  the 
practical  rectitudes  of  life,  as  she  conceived  them  to 
exist " ;  and  accordingly  Alice  is  married  to  a  prosaic 
doctor,  and  lives  a  life  of  dull  British  respectability. 
The  "  amorous  plenitude  "  of  arm  and  bosom  in  her 
sister  Olive  and  her  extremities  flowing  into  "  chaste 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     139 

slendernesses  "  mark  her  out  for  a  vapid  and  futile  pur- 
suit of  a  titled  husband.  May  Gould  is  a  round,  soft- 
limbed  girl :  "  the  soft,  the  melting,  the  almost  fluid 
eyes,  the  bosom  large  and  just  a  little  falling,  the  full 
lips,  the  absence  of  any  marked  point  or  line,  the  rolling 
roundness  of  every  part  of  the  body  announced  a  want 
of  fixed  principle,  and  a  somewhat  gross  and  sensual 
temperament."  May  gives  and  takes  pleasure  as  oppor- 
tunity offers,  and  fares  as  prosperously  as  any  of  her 
friends.  Cecilia,  having  a  deformed  body,  necessarily 
conceives  of  life  as  "  a  libidinous  monster  crouching  in  a 
cave,  with  red  jaws  dripping  with  foul  spume."  She 
abhors  equally  Alice's  honest  marriage  and  May's 
liaisons:  "  It  is  the  same  thing;  one  seeks  a  husband,  an- 
other gratifies  herself  with  a  lover.  It  is  the  same 
thing.  Where's  the  difference?  It  is  animal  passion 
all  the  same." 

Mr.  Moore  himself  takes  essentially  Cecilia's  position. 
For  him  animal  passion  is  the  reality  underlying  all  the 
mummeries  of  marriage,  society,  fashion,  and  religion. 
He  finds  his  "  fun,"  as  Henry  James  would  say,  in  strip- 
ping off  the  masks.  Here,  for  example,  is  his  not  alto- 
gether sympathetic  account  of  the  celebration  of  the 
Mass  in  the  presence  of  an  elegantly  hypocritical  gentry 
and  a  brutal  and  superstitious  peasantry : 

The  mumbled  Latin,  the  by-play  of  the  wine  and  water, 
the  mumming  of  the  uplifted  hands,  were  so  appallingly 
trivial,  and,  worse  still,  all  realisation  of  the  idea  seemed 
impossible  to  the  mind  of  the  congregation.  Passing  by. 
without  scorn,  the  belief  that  the  white  wafer  the  priest  held 
above  his  head,  in  this  lonely  Irish  chapel,  was  the  Creator 


140     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

of  the  twenty  millions  of  suns  in  the  Milky  Way,  she  (Alice) 
mused  on  the  faith  as  exhibited  by  those  who  came  to  wor- 
ship, and  that  which  would  have,  which  must  have,  inspired 
them,  were  Christianity  now,  as  it  once  was,  a  burning,  a 
vital  force  in  the  world.  Looking  round,  what  did  she  see? 
Here,  at  her  elbow,  were  the  gentry.  How  elegantly  they 
prayed,  with  what  refinement !  Their  social  position  was  as 
manifest  in  their  religion  as  in  their  homes,  their  language, 
their  food.  The  delicate  eyelids  were  closed  from  time  to 
time;  the  long  slim  fingers  held  the  gilt  missals  with  the 
same  well-bred  grace  as  they  would  a  fan;  their  thoughts 
would  have  passed  from  one  to  the  other  without  embarrass- 
ment. Clearly  they  considered  one  the  complement  of  the 
other.  At  the  Elevation,  the  delicate  necks  were  bowed, 
and,  had  lovers  been  whispering  in  their  ears,  greater  mod- 
esty could  not  have  been  shown. 

They  had  come  to  be  in  the  absolute  presence  of  God,  the 
Distributor  of  Eternal  rewards  and  punishments — and  yet 
they  had  taken  advantage  of  this  stupendous  mystery  to 
meet  for  the  purpose  of  arranging  the  details  of  a  ball. 

The  peasantry  filled  the  body  of  the  church.  They 
prayed  coarsely,  ignorantly,  with  the  same  brutality  as  they 
lived.  Just  behind  Alice  a  man  groaned.  He  cleared  his 
throat  with  loud  guffaws:  she  listened  to  hear  the  saliva 
fall:  it  splashed  on  the  earthen  floor.  Further  away  a 
circle  of  dried  and  yellowing  faces  bespoke  centuries  of 
damp  cabins,  brutalising  toil,  occasional  starvation.  They 
moaned  and  sighed,  a  prey  to  the  gross  superstition  of  the 
moment.  One  man,  bent  double,  beat  a  ragged  shirt  with 
a  clenched  fist;  the  women  of  forty,  with  cloaks  drawn  over 
their  foreheads  and  trailing  on  the  ground  in  long  black 
folds,  crouched  until  only  the  lean  hard-worked  hands  that 
held  the  rosary  were  seen  over  the  bench  rail.  The  young 
men  stared  arrogantly,  wearied  by  the  length  of  the  service. 

They,  too,  had  come  to  be  in  the  absolute  presence  of 
God — the  Distributor  of  Eternal  rewards  and  punishments 
— and  yet  they  had  taken  advantage  of  the  occasion  of  this 


stupendous  mystery  for  the  purpose  of  arranging  a  land 
meeting. 

One  can  readily  enough  understand  why  a  "  blithe 
pagan  "  like  Mr.  Moore  finds  little  to  enlist  his  sympa- 
thies in  witnessing  a  celebration  of  the  Mass  in  a  little 
Irish  chapel.  It  is  not  so  easy  to  explain  why  he  sustains 
his  air  of  disgust  in  describing  such  eminently 
"  worldly  "  scenes  as  the  great  ball  at  Dublin  Castle. 
The  fact  is  that  he  is  a  pretty  poor  "  pagan,"  and  not 
very  "  blithe."  He  is  a  nineteenth  century  "  naturalist  " 
who  has  read  Schopenhauer's  essay  on  women  and  has 
seen  an  opportunity  for  a  novel  aesthetic  effect  in  a 
sneeringly  anti-romantic  representation  of  the  relations 
between  men  and  women.  He  describes  this  brilliant 
event  of  the  social  season  very  much  as  a  hunter  of 
literary  turn  might  describe  the  behavior  of  a  herd  of 
elk  in  mating  time — a  hunter  who  should  take  his  stand 
with  the  females  of  the  herd,  and  try  to  interpret 
their  emotions  of  nervous  expectation  and  their  efforts 
to  make  themselves  attractive  to  the  ranging  males. 
In  Mr.  Moore's  opinion  the  women  novelists — George 
Eliot,  George  Sand,  and  the  rest — have  failed  to 
utilize  the  opportunities  of  their  sex ;  they  have  written 
like  men;  they  have  left  unpictured  the  mating  en- 
counter as  seen  from  the  feminine  point  of  view.  Mr. 
Moore  with  his  feminine  intuitions  has  stepped  into  the 
breach,  has  familiarized  himself  with  the  mysteries  of 
petticoats  and  lingerie,  and  has  shown  just  how  the 
despicable  man-hunt  looks  to  intriguing  mammas  and 
rosy  compliant  daughters  and  to  the  hysterical  feminist 


142     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

of  1885.  His  picture  reminds  one  very  faintly  of 
Jane  Austen;  but  she  dissipates  romance  with  eight- 
eenth century  common  sense,  and  he  with  the  cynicism 
of  a  nineteenth  century  naturalist.  His  contempt  for 
the  whole  social  exhibition  is  curiously  emphasized  by 
the  interjection  of  an  occasional  highly-wrought  para- 
graph in  the  manner  of  Huysmans,  descriptive  of  the 
silks  and  shoulders  and  odors,  which,  for  the  sniffing 
aesthetic  observer,  constitute  the  high  points  of  the 
occasion.  Has  any  English  novelist  written  a  more  ex- 
quisite appreciation  of  dress  goods  than  this? 

With  words  of  compliment  and  solicitation,  the  black- 
dressed  assistant  displayed  the  armouries  of  Venus — ar- 
mouries filled  with  the  deep  blue  of  midnight,  with  the 
faint  tints  of  dawn,  with  strange  flowers  and  birds,  with 
moths,  and  moons,  and  stars.  Lengths  of  white  silk  clear 
as  the  notes  of  violins  playing  in  a  minor  key;  white  poplin 
falling  into  folds  statuesque  as  the  bass  of  a  fugue  by  Bach ; 
yards  of  ruby  velvet,  rich  as  an  air  from  Verdi  played  on 
the  piano;  tender  green  velvet,  pastoral  as  hautboys  heard 
beneath  trees  in  a  fair  Arcadian  vale;  blue  turquoise  faille 
Fran£aise  fanciful  as  the  twinkling  of  a  guitar  twanged 
by  a  Watteau  shepherd;  .  .  .  white  faille,  soft  draperies 
of  tulle,  garlands  of  white  lilac,  sprays  of  white  heather, 
delicate  and  resonant  as  the  treble  voices  of  children  sing- 
ing carols  in  dewy  English  woods ;  berthas,  flounces,  plumes, 
stomachers,  lappets,  veils  frivolous  as  the  strains  of  a 
German  waltz  played  on  Liddell's  band. 

Has  any  one  ever  exhibited  greater  connoiseurship 
in  shoulders  than  appears  in  the  following? — 

There  heat  and  fatigue  soon  put  an  end  to  all  coquetting 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     143 

between  the  sexes.  The  beautiful  silks  were  hidden  by  the 
crowd;  only  the  shoulders  remained,  and,  to  appease  their 
terrible  ennui,  the  men  gazed  down  the  backs  of  the  women's 
dresses  stupidly.  Shoulders  were  there,  of  all  tints  and 
shapes.  Indeed,  it  was  like  a  vast  rosary,  alive  with  white, 
pink,  and  cream-colored  flowers:  of  Marechal  Niels,  Souve- 
nir de  Malmaisons,  Mademoiselle  Eugene  Verdiers,  Aimee 
Vibert  Scandens.  Sweetly  turned  adolescent  shoulders, 
blush  white,  smooth  and  even  as  the  petals  of  a  Marquise 
Mortemarle;  the  strong  commonly  turned  shoulders,  abun- 
dant and  free  as  the  fresh  rosy  pink  of  the  Anna  Alinuff; 
the  drooping  white  shoulders  full  of  falling  contours  as 
pale  as  a  Madame  Lacharme ;  the  chlorotic  shoulders,  deadly 
white,  of  the  almost  greenish  shade  that  is  found  in  a 
Princess  Clementine  .  .  .  and,  just  in  front  of  me,  under 
my  eyes,  the  flowery,  the  voluptuous,  the  statuesque  shoul- 
ders of  a  tall  blonde  woman  of  thirty  whose  flesh  is  full 
of  the  exquisite  peach-like  tones  of  a  Mademoiselle  Eugene 
Verdier,  blooming  in  all  its  pride  of  summer  loveliness. 

Finally,  has  any  writer  in  English  ever  given  to  the 
odors  of  the  human  herd  more  lyrical  expression  than 
this?— 

Momentarily  the  air  grew  hotter  and  more  silicious;  the 
brain  ached  with  the  dusty  odor  of  poudre  de  ris,  and  the 
many  acidities  of  evaporating  perfumes;  the  sugary  sweet- 
ness of  the  blondes,  the  salt  flavours  of  the  brunettes,  and 
this  allegro  movement  of  odors  was  interrupted  suddenly 
by  the  garlicky  andante,  deep  as  the  pedal  notes  of  an 
organ,  that  the  perspiring  arms  of  a  fat  chaperone  slowly 
exhaled. 

What  is  the  artistic  intention  of  these  purple  para- 
graphs? They  are  designed  to  intensify  the  curious 


dull  emotion  of  revulsion  which  a  healthy  human  being 
feels  in  the  presence  of  a  subtly  derisive  representation 
of  his  kind — a  representation  of  human  weakness  and 
folly  and  sensuality  unrelieved  by  the  admission  of  any- 
thing sacred,  anything  noble,  anything  morally  sound 
and  sweet.  A  novelist  who  cares  a  rap  about  represent- 
ing life  whole  feels  bound  to  establish  somewhere  in  his 
picture  of  the  human  scene  "  reflectors  "  of  the  light  of 
his  own  ideals  or  of  his  common  sense,  if  he  has  no  ideals. 
This  light  may  be  reflected  by  some  of  the  characters  in 
the  action;  it  may  be  irradiated  over  them  all  by  the 
author's  comments  upon  the  characters ;  it  may  even 
flash  out  with  adequate  illumination  from  the  course  of 
the  action  itself.  At  the  points  in  Mr.  Moore's  narra- 
tive where  one  looks  for  light,  what  does  one  find? 
Well,  when  one  turns  from  the  petty  and  sordid  "  souls  " 
of  his  presented  characters,  one  is  invited  by  the  author 
to  fix  one's  mind  upon  the  sounds  of  their  dress  goods, 
the  tones  of  their  skins,  and  the  tastes  of  their 
odors! 

Does  Mr.  Moore  sympathize  with  any  of  the  charac- 
ters in  A  Drama  in  Muslin?  Yes,  at  certain  points  of 
the  story  he  sympathizes  with  the  intellectual  position  of 
Alice  Barton.  This  young  woman  has  at  least  partly 
emancipated  herself  from  religious  and  conventional 
modes  of  thought.  She  has  half-formulated  for  herself 
George  Moore's  own  naturalistic  philosophy.  She  be- 
lieves that  "  the  most  feasible  mode  of  life  is  to  try  to 
live  up  to  the  ordinary  simple  laws  of  nature  of  which 
we  are  but  a  part."  "  In  an  obscure  and  formless  way," 
he  says,  "  she  had  divined  the  doctrines  of  Eduard  von 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     145 

Hartmann,  the  entire  and  unconditional  resignation  of 
personal  existence  into  the  arms  of  the  cosmic  process." 
Her  solution  beautifully  makes  an  end  of  the  moral 
conflict  of  the  ages — the  struggle  of  man  to  subject  his 
lower  to  his  higher  nature,  to  make  his  conduct  conform 
to  an  ideal  of  conduct :  she  would  make  "  the  ends  of 
nature  also  the  ends  of  what  we  call  conscience  " — just 
as  the  other  animals  do.  Virtue  under  this  principle 
consists  in  frankly  yielding  to  one's  instincts.  The 
misery  of  life  comes  from  resisting  them.  If  you  resist 
them  it  is  because  you  are  a  hypocrite,  or  a  coward,  or  a 
fool. 

It  is  not  necessary  to  examine  in  detail  all  Mr. 
Moore's  later  "  realistic "  representation  of  man  as 
animal.  Novels  like  Spring  Days,  for  example,  which 
was  published  in  1888,  and  Vain  Fortune,  published  in 
1890,  are  comparatively  insipid  performances,  and  they 
add  nothing  to  our  previous  impression  of  his  methods 
and  purposes.  Nor  need  we  tarry  long  over  his  realistic 
masterpiece  Esther  Waters,  1894.  It  is  the  most  elab- 
orate and  learned  study  in  literature  of  the  English 
housemaid  and  barmaid  and  her  environment.  When 
Mr.  Moore  was  a  youth,  before  Shelley  had  kindled  his 
imagination,  he  acquired  an  intimate  knowledge  of  cer- 
tain aspects  of  life  in  his  father's  racing  stables;  and 
to  this  fund  of  special  information  he  has  added  from 
time  to  time  by  intimate  studies  of  charwomen  and 
chambermaids.  Drawing  upon  these  rich  resources,  he 
has  recreated  with  amazing  verisimilitude  all  the  smells 
and  sights  and  voices  amid  which  Esther's  stubborn 
"  will-to-live  "  shaped  her  inconspicuous  career:  jockeys 


146     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

and  stable-talk,  kitchen  wenches  and  kitchen  talk,  the 
lying-in  hospital,  the  nursery  where  unwelcome  children 
are  killed  off  at  £5  "  per,"  the  bedroom  in  the  garret, 
the  tavern,  the  drunkards,  the  race-track,  the  betting- 
man,  the  street-walkers,  and  only  so  much  of  the  life 
above  stairs  as  an  English  "  slavey  "  sees.  Esther  has 
an  illegitimate  child  by  a  man  in  livery  at  her  first  place 
of  employment.  The  man  in  livery  is  dismissed  because 
he  is  courted  by  a  young  lady  who  is  a  guest  upstairs. 
Later  Esther  also  loses  a  position  through  the  amorous 
approaches  of  a  young  gentleman  in  the  house  to  whose 
advances  she  has  not  responded.  After  her  first  slip 
she  is  kept  straight  by  a  dogged,  instinctive,  passionate 
fidelity  to  her  child — by  the  necessity  of  keeping  in  her 
employer's  graces  so  that  she  and  her  child  may  live. 
In  the  course  of  eight  or  ten  years  she  meets  again  and 
marries  the  man  who  abandoned  her ;  but  presently  he 
loses  all  he  has  in  the  races,  and  dies  of  consumption. 
The  widowed  Esther  returns  to  her  first  mistress,  now 
a  widow  also;  and  the  two  lonely  women  in  the  lonely 
decaying  house  live  on  together  in  an  almost  sisterly 
relationship.  Her  son  becomes  a  soldier,  and  she  is  very 
proud  and  happy  when  she  sees  him  in  his  red  uniform. 
The  story  has  a  certain  dull  gray  pathos,  for  which  it 
has  been  much  admired.  Esther  is  only  a  strong  igno- 
rant drudge,  innately  stupid — she  cannot  be  taught  to 
read;  yet  she  is  the  most  appealing  figure  in  all  Mr. 
Moore's  fictitious  world.  Her  patient  endurance  of  the 
world,  her  heroic  toil  for  her  offspring,  and  her  all- 
absorbing  maternal  passion  would  awaken  elementary 
and  profound  sympathies,  if  one  were  a  little  less  con- 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE      147 

scious  of  her  role  as  demonstrator  of  the  thesis  that  the 
blind  instincts  of  reproduction  and  self-preservation 
account  for  everything  that  is  significant  in  human 
destiny. 

If  you  accept  this  thesis,  you  will  not  judge  people 
as  of  "  good  "  or  of  "  bad  "  character.  You  will  only 
mark  in  them  the  strength  or  the  weakness  of  the  "  vital 
force  "  which  impels  them  to  act  as  they  do  and  not 
otherwise.  If  the  vital  force  in  them  is  a  powerful 
driving  stream  of  energy,  you  will  envy  and  admire 
them.  If  it  is  fluctuating  and  feeble,  you  will  despise 
them.  The  desire  to  sing,  to  paint,  to  pray — all  these 
you  will  recognize  as  but  allotropic  phases  of  sexual 
emotion.  When  Mr.  Moore  had  thoroughly  grasped 
this  thought,  his  spirit  was  cheered  and  comforted. 
He  had  long  lacked  a  hero.  He  had  perhaps  grown  a 
little  weary  of  sneering  at  all  things.  Some  inappeas- 
able  instinct  in  him  demanded  some  object  for  his  alle- 
giance. He  found  his  hero,  his  object  of  allegiance,  in 
the  "  cosmic  processes."  When  one  compares  his  novels 
written  in  the  'nineties  with  those  written  in  the 
'eighties,  one  perceives  a  certain  shifting  in  emphasis 
from  the  external  to  the  internal  factors  in  character — a 
shifting  from  a  "  mechanistic "  to  a  "  vitalistic " 
formula.  There  is,  for  example,  this  distinction  between 
A  Mummer's  Wife  and  Esther  Waters:  the  first  is  a 
study  of  the  victorious  force  of  environment ;  the  second 
is  a  study  of  the  victorious  force  of  the  "  will-to-live  " 
and  to  perpetuate  one's  kind. 

As  a  champion  of  the  cosmic  processes,  Mr.  Moore 
feels  a  growing  interest  in  artistic  sterility  and  religious 


148     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

celibacy  and  their  physiological  connections.  There  is 
something  of  his  new  note,  the  pathos  of  sterility,  in 
A  Drama  in  Muslin:  there  is  much  more  of  it  in  Vain 
Fortune:  and  it  is  plangent  in  Celibates,  1895.  Celi- 
bates, according  to  his  interpretation,  are  persons  in 
whom  the  vital  force  is  feeble,  or  has  been  checked  and 
thwarted  by  some  perversity  of  doctrine  or  by  some  hos- 
tility of  environment.  Mildred  Lawson  in  Celibates  is 
a  study  of  unchaste  chastity.  The  vital  force  in  her  is 
represented  as  just  strong  enough  to  make  her  lascivious 
and  just  feeble  enough  to  keep  her  "  chaste."  She  has 
a  queasy  appetite  for  artistic  expression  and  a  life  of 
passion:  she  toys  with  art  and  abandons  it  to  toy  with 
and  torment  a  series  of  lovers ;  not  virtue  but  timidity 
and  impotence  inhibit  her  desires.  One  suspects  that 
she,  like  many  of  Mr.  Moore's  women,  is  in  considerable 
measure  an  "  autobiographical  revelation."  She  is  a 
Vestal  vampire — one  of  the  most  noxious  and  noisome 
creatures  in  English  literature.  But  mark  how  artfully 
Mr.  Moore  avails  himself  of  her  low  value,  or  rather, 
let  us  say,  of  her  worthlessness,  to  raise  the  "  price  "  of 
a  common  commodity.  The  mouthpiece  of  the  "  cosmic 
processes  "  in  this  story  is  an  artist's  model  who  has 
also  served  in  another  capacity  one  of  Mildred's  lovers, 
killed  by  Mildred's  unkindness.  Between  Mildred  and 
the  model  this  clarification  of  the  moral  issues  takes 
place : 

'  I  did  not  know  of  your  existence  till  the  other  day.  I 
heard  that ' 

'  That  I  was  his  mistress.  Well,  so  I  was.  It  appears 
that  you  were  not.  But,  I  should  like  to  know  which  of  us 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     149 

two  is  the  most  virtuous,  which  has  done  the  least  harm. 
I  made  him  happy,  you  killed  him.' 

In  "  John  Norton,"  a  second  story  in  Celibates,  Mr. 
Moore  occupies  himself  with  tracing  to  a  kind  of  faint- 
ness  of  sexual  impulse  his  hero's  taste  for  the  marmoreal 
and  virginal  type  of  woman,  his  taste  for  monastic 
severity  in  his  material  surroundings,  and,  finally,  his 
taste  for  the  cloister  and  an  ascetic  God.  The  story  is 
written  with  aesthetic  intensity;  and  the  aesthetically 
exquisite  appreciations  of  the  vernal  beauty  of  Kitty, 
alive  and  dead,  are  calculated  to  make  the  casual  reader 
unmindful  of  the  anti-religious  innuendo,  the  insidious 
malice,  which  lurks  in  every  page.  John  Norton  is  pre- 
sented a  little  in  the  manner  of  Anatole  France,  as  this 
passage  will  perhaps  suggest  to  readers  of  Thais: 

He  rose  from  the  table,  and  looked  round  the  room.  The 
room  seemed  to  him  a  symbol — the  voluptuous  bed,  the  cor- 
pulent arm-chair,  the  toilet-table  shapeless  with  muslin — of 
the  hideous  laws  of  the  world  and  the  flesh,  ever  at  variance 
and  at  war,  and  ever  defeating  the  indomitable  aspirations 
of  the  soul.  John  ordered  his  room  to  be  changed;  and  in 
the  face  of  much  opposition  from  his  mother,  who  declared 
that  he  would  never  be  able  to  sleep  there,  and  would  lose 
his  health,  he  selected  a  narrow  room  at  the  end  of  the 
passage.  He  would  have  no  carpet.  He  placed  a  small 
iron  bed  against  the  wall;  two  plain  chairs,  a  screen  to 
keep  off  the  draft  from  the  door,  a  small  basin-stand,  such 
as  you  might  find  in  a  ship's  cabin,  and  a  prie-dieu  were  all 
the  furniture  he  permitted  himself. 

'  Oh,  what  a  relief ! '  he  murmured.  '  Now  there  is  line, 
there  is  definite  shape.  That  formless  upholstery  frets  my 
eye  as  false  notes  grate  on  my  ear':  and,  becoming  sud- 


150     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

denly  conscious  of  the  presence  of  God,  he  fell  on  his  knees 
and  prayed. 

In  Evelyn  Innes,  1898,  and  its  sequel  Sister  Teresa, 
1901,  Mr.  Moore  presents  a  heroine  of  genuine  artistic 
temperament  and  artistic  power.  She  yields  with  per- 
fect abandon  to  the  vital  forces  within  her  which  crave 
expression  in  sensual  passion  and  sensuous  music. 
When  she  has  realized  all  her  possibilities  as  lover  and  as 
artist  she  is  impelled  to  realize  with  similar  complete- 
ness all  the  possibilities  of  the  religious  life.  All  phases 
of  her  career — the  sexual,  the  musical,  and  the  re- 
ligious— are  represented  as  consequences  and  manifesta- 
tion of  a  profound  elan  vital  over  which  she  has  no  more 
control  than  a  rose  has  over  its  thorns  or  the  sap  in  its 
stem  or  the  vermeil  tints  in  its  petals.  The  notion  of  a 
rational  self-determination,  of  an  intelligible  object 
guiding  a  man  like  a  star  to  ideal  ends — this  we  are  to 
believe  is  an  illusion.  We — that  is  the  housemaids  and 
artists  with  whom  Mr.  Moore  is  familiar — can  do  noth- 
ing but  what  is  predetermined  by  the  blind  push  in  the 
darkness  below  and  behind  us  of  the  unconscious  energy 
which  animates  the  flowers  and  the  beasts  of  the  field. 
To  surrender  wholly  to  the  current  of  our  natural 
impulses,  to  relish  the  undirected  streaming  of  our  sen- 
sations, to  ask  not  whither  we  are  drifting — this  is  the 
way  to  make  the  most  of  ourselves.  This  is  Mr.  Moore's 
philosophy  of  naturalism. 

We  must  return  now  to  record  Mr.  Moore's  liaison 
with  his  native  land.  In  1894,  three  years  after  the 
date  which  Lady  Gregory  regards  as  the  definitive  awak- 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     151 

ening  of  the  Irish  imagination,  he  still  thought  of  Ire- 
land as  a  wretched  realm  by  him  happily  abandoned, 
where  no  one  did  anything  "  except  bring  turf  from  the 
bogs  and  say  prayers."  He  was  still  writing  realistic 
English  novels,  explaining  Ingres  and  Manet  to  the 
British  public,  and  enriching  his  midnights  by  the  ex- 
change of  impressions  and  sensations  with  Mr.  Arthur 
Symons  in  the  Temple.  He  had  begun,  however,  to  hear 
with  increasing  interest  rumors  that  a  mysterious  angel 
was  troubling  the  waters  of  the  pale  green  Irish  lake. 
In  Kiltartan  Lady  Gregory  was  collecting  folklore  and 
by  humble  hearthsides  learning  the  quaint  old  songs  of 
the  peasants.  In  Dublin  a  pale,  thin  poet,  William 
Butler  Yeats,  was  dreaming  his  way  backward  into  the 
dim  legendary  days  of  Cuchullin  and  Diarmuid.  One 
momentous  night  his  fellow  Templar,  Edward  Martyn, 
Roman  Catholic,  celibate,  amateur  in  letters,  hinted  in 
his  presence  a  desire  for  the  ability  to  compose  his  plays 
in  Irish.  Piquant  suggestion!  As  at  the  touch  of  an 
enchanted  wand  the  closed  cavern  of  Mr.  Moore's  youth 
opened,  and  through  his  consciousness  drifted  vague 
Irish  memories  faintly  pungent  like  the  smoke  of  a  peat 
fire  trailing  over  a  low  roof  of  thatch.  Along  his  nerves 
he  felt  a  premonitory  tingling  prophetic  of  a  literary 
movement.  He  recalled  an  ancient  saw  of  Turgenieff's, 
"  Russia  can  do  without  any  of  us,  but  none  of  us  can 
do  without  Russia."  What  if  he  should  go  to  Ireland 
and  look  into  the  matter. 

Behold  him  now  in  Dublin  with  bosom  bared  to  every 
wanton  breeze,  whiffing  and  sniffing  the  exciting  air,  and 
eagerly  wooing  to  be  wooed.  A  little  chilled  by  the  want 


of  salvos  greeting  the  return  of  the  distinguished  prodi- 
gal and  literary  elder  brother,  he  duly  casts  a  superior 
eye  over  the  undertakings  of  the  Celtic  enthusiasts, 
inspects  the  theatre,  revises  plays,  passes  judgment  on 
poems,  and  even  delivers  an  occasional  speech  at  a  meet- 
ing of  the  Gaelic  League.  But  something  present  in 
them  or  lacking  in  him  prevented  their  working  in  per- 
fect unity  of  spirit.  Lady  Gregory  feared  that  he 
would  break  up  the  mold  of  Yeats's  mind.  He  feared 
that  Yeats  would  break  up  the  mold  of  his.  A  suspicion 
on  their  side  that  he  was  not  quite  one  of  them  and  a 
tinge  of  jealousy  on  his  side,  reinforced  by  a  conviction 
that  they  were  "  subalterns,"  widened  the  rift  between 
them.  The  fact  is  that  in  their  divers  fashions  they 
loved  Ireland  as  their  venerable  mother.  He,  an  inter- 
national philanderer,  despised  Ireland,  hoped  that  she 
would  make  love  to  him,  tell  him  her  secrets,  "  enwomb  " 
his  thoughts,  and  let  him  go.  It  were  tedious  to  detail 
the  long-drawn-out  aesthetic  coquetry  which  terminated 
in  his  final  rupture  with  England  and  the  formation  of 
the  Irish  liaison. 

Perhaps  the  most  interesting  first  fruits  of  this  amour 
were  the  volume  of  sketches  entitled  The  Unfilled  Field 
and  the  symbolistic  novel  called  The  Lake;  I  have  fre- 
quently tried  to  read  two  of  his  plays  but  quite  without 
success.  The  first  of  these  books  is  comparable  in  many 
ways  with  the  justly  celebrated  work  which  seems  to  have 
inspired  it,  Turgenieff's  Memoirs  of  a  Sportsman.  The 
second  is  Mr.  Moore's  own  very  contemporaneous  ver- 
sion of  the  unbinding  of  Prometheus — a  piece  of  sym- 
bolism which  summarizes  whatever  there  has  been  of 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     153 

"  Messianic  "  character  in  the  author's  career.  The 
protagonist  of  this  strange  fiction  is  Father  Oliver,  a 
Roman  Catholic  priest,  who  dwells  in  a  little  cottage  by 
a  pale  green  Irish  lake.  He  is  fettered  there  by  acci- 
dent, custom,  tradition;  the  vulture  that  consumes  his 
liver  is  the  ordinary  routine  of  life.  Through  more 
than  three  hundred  pages  Father  Oliver  hovers  about 
this  lake,  as  vague,  indeterminate,  and  purposeless  as 
the  mist  that  gathers  and  dissolves  upon  its  bosom.  At 
last  an  imperative  instinct  quickens  in  his  blood  like  that 
which  directs  the  mating  and  seasonal  migrations  of  wild 
geese;  he  steals  down  to  the  bank,  strips  to  the  skin, 
hesitates  for  a  moment,  then  plunges  into  the  deep, 
swims  to  the  other  shore,  and  flees  away.  Thus  the 
naturalistic  philosophy  of  Esther  Waters,  Evelyn  Innes, 
and  Sister  Teresa  is  "  enwombed  "  in  Ireland.  Father 
Oliver  is  the  spirit  of  man  in  modern  times;  he  is  the 
spirit  of  the  Irish  Renaissance ;  he  is,  in  short,  the  per- 
fectly emancipated  spirit  of  George  Moore. 

The  first  volume  of  Hail  and  Farewell  sets  forth  in 
full  the  considerations  and  reconsiderations  which  led 
Mr.  Moore  in  the  days  of  the  Boer  War  to  make  his 
reconnoitering  expedition  into  Ireland  and  to  take  coun- 
sel with  the  literary  chiefs  in  Dublin  concerning  the 
future  of  art.  The  second  volume  treats  of  the  trans- 
ference from  London  to  Dublin  of  his  bag  and  baggage, 
his  Manets  and  his  Monets,  of  his  long  and  earnest 
endeavor  to  become  a  concordant  note  in  the  Irish 
Renaissance,  and  of  his  final  tragic  conviction  that 
Roman  Catholicism  is  hostile  to  art,  and  that  dogma 
and  literature  are  incompatible.  The  anti-Roman  thesis 


ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

gives  a  certain  tenuous  continuity,  but  it  appears  to 
be  only  incidental  to  the  main  purpose  of  the  work. 
The  third  volume  is  a  melange  of  reminiscences,  musings, 
and  informal  criticism. 

The  main  purpose  of  Hail  and  Farewell  may  best  be 
explained  by  reference  to  the  nearest  French  equivalent. 
In  the  preface  to  the  great  Journal  des  Goncourt, 
brother  Edmond  says :  "  We  have  tried  to  make  our 
contemporaries  live  again  among  posterity  in  life-like 
guise,  to  make  them  live  again  by  the  spirited  stenog- 
raphy of  a  conversation,  by  the  physiological  surprise 
of  a  gesture,  by  those  flashes  of  passion  in  which  a  per- 
sonality is  revealed,  by  that  je  ne  sais  quoi  which  renders 
the  intensity  of  life — by  noting,  in  short,  a  little  of  that 
fever  which  is  peculiar  to  the  heady  life  of  Paris."  On 
the  28th  of  May,  1857,  the  Goncourt  firm  entered  this 
thought  in  their  j  ournal :  Un  joli  litre  pour  des  souve- 
nirs publics  de  son  vivant:  SOUVENIRS  DE  MA  VIE  MORTE. 
In  1906  Mr.  Moore  carried  out  the  hint  with  his 
Memoirs  of  My  Dead  Life.  Add  to  this  his  earlier 
Confessions  of  a  Young  Man  and  the  Irish  trilogy,  and 
the  scope  of  his  design  becomes  apparent :  he  aspires  to 
be  the  Goncourt  of  the  English  decadence — the  Boswell 
of  a  literary  generation. 

It  is  hardly  necessary  to  remark  that  the  matter  of 
his  epos  is  distinctly  inferior.  In  the  French  work  we 
are  confronted  with  the  real  leaders  of  the  generation, 
the  peers  of  France  who  received  their  inheritance  from 
Hugo  and  Balzac:  Flaubert  with  his  life  poisoned  by 
remorse  for  once  having  coupled  two  genitives,  Gautier 
exploding  in  reckless  paradox,  Sainte-Beuve  adorned 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     155 

with  earrings  of  cherries  and  overflowing  in  fine  mali- 
cious chat,  Taine  disputatious,  Scherer  coldly  circum- 
spect, Renan  silent  but  curious  like  a  respectable  woman 
at  a  supper  of  courtesans,  Zola  comparing  notes  with 
Edmond  on  the  pain  in  his  intestines — and  much  more 
of  less  and  greater  import.  This  gossip  at  the  lowest 
is  still,  so  to  speak,  gossip  from  the  tents  of  the  heroes 
encamped  before  Troy.  When  we  turn  to  Mr.  Moore's 
journals,  we  are  not  turning  to  the  Goncourt  of  a  cor- 
responding literary  generation  in  England.  We  are  no 
longer  at  the  center  of  the  engagement.  We  are  rather 
regaled  with  gossip  from  the  camp-followers  of  the 
French  movement.  It  is  Symons,  and  Yeats,  and  Moore 
against  Sainte-Beuve,  and  Flaubert,  and  Zola.  On  the 
whole,  it  is  an  English  "  Epigoniad  "  against  a  French 
"  Iliad." 

Yet  as  the  Goncourt  of  English  "  side-issues  "  Mr. 
Moore  has  no  rival.  He  deserves  the  credit  for  intro- 
ducing into  English  a  vivid  personal  narrative  of  liter- 
ary contemporaries,  which  is  almost  a  new  literary  form : 
what  though  all  his  heresies  were  long  since  anticipated 
by  the  guests  at  the  Magny  dinners.  His  work,  further- 
more, so  far  as  the  manner  is  concerned,  possesses  both 
the  merits  and  defects  of  his  French  predecessors.  He 
says  apparently  everything  that  he  pleases  without 
regard  to  the  pleasure  of  living  sensibilities.  He 
mingles  delightful  bits  of  reverie  with  passages  of 
studied  grossness,  pages  of  piquant  dialogue,  epigrams, 
criticisms  of  music,  art,  poetry,  characters  of  the  living 
and  the  dead.  Most  of  his  Irish  fellow-workers  he 
sketches  with  the  detachment  of  a  whimsical  contempt. 


156     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

Of  "  dear  old  "  Edward  Martyn,  one  of  the  lesser  drama- 
tists, he  writes,  with  his  usual  felicity  of  suggestion: 

A  great  psychologist  might  have  predicted  his  solitary 
life  in  two  musty  rooms  above  a  tobacconist's  shop,  and  his 
last  habits,  such  as  pouring  his  tea  into  a  saucer,  balancing 
the  saucer  on  three  fingers  like  an  old  woman  in  the  country. 
Edward  is  all  right  if  he  gets  his  mass  in  the  morning  and 
his  pipe  in  the  evening.  A  great  bulk  of  peasantry  with  a 
delicious  strain  of  Palestrina  running  through  it. 

He  never  lets  slip  an  opportunity  to  add  a  comic 
stroke  to  his  delineation  of  the  character  of  Mr.  Yeats : 

When  the  hooker  that  was  taking  Yeats  over  to  Aran,  or 
taking  him  back  to  Galway,  was  caught  in  a  storm,  Yeats  fell 
upon  his  knees  and  tried  to  say  a  prayer;  but  the  nearest 
thing  to  one  he  could  think  of  was,  "  Of  man's  first  dis- 
obedience and  the  fruit,"  and  he  spoke  as  much  of  "  Para- 
dise Lost "  as  he  could  remember. 

As  usual,  Mr.  Moore  writes  with  most  particularity 
and  interest  of  himself.  He  makes  it  perfectly  clear  that 
Ireland  could  never  be  anything  to  him  but  an  exquisite 
place  to  dream  in :  "  Oh,  how  beautiful  is  the  world  of 
vagrancy  lost  to  us  forever,  AE. ! "  There  is  nothing 
finer  in  all  Moore's  works  than  some  of  these  occasional 
passages  of  vague  and  drifting  reverie : 

A  numbness  stole  upon  my  eyelids,  and  I  began  to  see  the 
strange  folk  plainer,  coming  in  procession  to  the  altar, 
headed  by  the  Druids.  Ireland  was  wonderful  then,  .  .  . 
and,  opening  my  eyes,  Ireland  seemed  wonderful  in  the  blue 
morning  that  hung  above  her,  unfolding  like  a  flower — a 
great  blue  convolvulus  hanging  above  the  green  land,  swell- 


ing  like  the  sea.  My  eyes  closed  again.  It  seemed  to  me 
that  I  could  dream  for  ever  of  the  gods,  and  the  mysteries 
of  Time,  and  the  changes  in  the  life  of  Man,  of  the  listless 
beauty  of  the  sky  above,  fading  imperceptibly  as  the  hours 
went  by. 

After  a  succession  of  these  fine  swan  flights,  it  is 
amusing  to  find  Mr.  Moore  comparing  himself  with 
Catholic  Martyn,  and  wondering  whether  it  would  be 
wise  for  him  to  exchange,  "  were  it  possible,  a  wine- 
glass of  intelligence  for  a  rummer  of  temperament." 
More  to  the  point  is  the  passage  in  which  he  seems  to 
reveal  an  awareness  that  his  quarrel  is  not  with  Catholic 
Ireland  nor  with  Protestant  England,  but  with  the  whole 
spirit  of  Western  civilization.  His  final  words  of  self- 
justification  will  remind  the  reader  of  Dowden's  defence 
of  Shelley: 

The  right  of  property  holds  good  in  all  society;  but  in 
the  West  ethics  invade  the  personal  life  in  a  manner  un- 
known to  the  East,  so  much  so  that  the  Oriental  stands 
agape  at  our  folly,  knowing  well  that  every  man  brings 
different  instincts  and  ideas  into  the  world  with  them.  The 
East  says  to  the  West,  "  You  prate  incessantly  about 
monogamy — "  A  sudden  thought  darting  across  my  mind 
left  my  sentence  unfinished,  and  I  asked  myself  what  man- 
ner of  man  I  was.  .  .  .  An  extraordinarily  clear  and  in- 
flexible moral  sense  rose  up  and  confronted  me,  and  looking 
down  my  past  life,  I  was  astonished  to  see  how  dependent 
my  deeds  had  always  been  upon  my  ideas.  /  had  never  been 
able  to  do  anything  that  I  thought  wrong,  and  my  conscience 
had  inspired  my  books. 

However  ill  Mr.  Moore  has  prospered  in  his  endeavor 
to  domesticate  in  England  this  Franco-Turkish  latitude 


158     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

of  conscience,  it  must  be  very  satisfactory  to  him  for  his 
own  part  to  look  back  over  a  perfectly  impeccable  past. 
We  Occidentals  know  little  of  this  inflexible  rectitude  of 
conduct.  It  is  at  odds  with  the  genius  of  our  morals 
and  of  our  literature.  Even  our  priests  and  holy  men 
have  not  professed  it ;  they  have  acknowledged  their  bad 
days  of  backsliding  and  shameful  defeat.  For  we  of 
English  race  know  ourselves  to  be  men  of  blood  and  sin, 
emerging  from  the  welter  and  conflict  with  blotted 
'scutcheons  to  partial  triumphs ;  and,  at  our  final  retro- 
spect, the  best  of  us  are  of  Henry  Fifth's  mood : 

More  will  I  do; 

Though  all  that  I  can  do  is  nothing  worth, 
Since  that  my  penitence  comes  after  all, 
Imploring  pardon. 

To  put  the  whole  matter  on  merely  literary  grounds, 
we  resist  Moore — though  he  is  a  pretty  writer — to  save 
Shakespeare,  whom,  on  the  whole,  year  in  and  year  out, 
we  prefer.  East  is  East,  and  West  is  West ;  and  when 
Mr.  Moore  has  drained  that  wine-glass  of  intelligence, 
he  may  have  another  flash  of  insight,  in  which  he  may 
perceive  that  it  is  not  dogma  and  literature  that  are 
incompatible,  but  George  Moore  and  an  English  tradi- 
tion of  a  thousand  years. 

If  one  writes  well  enough,  one  may  say  anything  one 
pleases.  A  man  who  takes  great  pains  with  his  style  is 
likely  in  the  long  run  to  have  a  devoted  following,  and 
to  get  a  hearing,  even  for  his  indiscretions  and  inepti- 
tudes. If  he  unites  with  his  talent  for  dulcet  utterance 
a  certain  instinct  for  "  sex  "  and  salacity  and  shocking 


middle-class  sensibilities,  he  is  pretty  sure  to  become  a 
celebrity,  and  he  has  a  fair  chance  of  becoming  a  classic, 
in  his  own  lifetime.  There  is  at  present  a  strong  demand 
for  the  sanction  given  to  the  discussion  of  questionable 
subjects  by  an  unquestionable  style.  Mr.  Moore  knows 
how  to  meet  that  demand.  Some  people  read  him  for 
his  style,  and  some  people  read  him  for  his  subjects. 
And  so  one  was  not  surprised  to  hear  him  hailed,  not 
long  ago,  as  the  greatest  master  of  English  since 
Thackeray.  His  latest  book,  The  Brook  Keriih,  is  said 
by  his  admirers  to  exhibit  him  at  his  best.  The  best 
work  of  the  "  greatest  master  of  English  since  Thack- 
eray "  should  be  an  event  of  first-rate  literary  impor- 
tance. It  should,  at  least,  bear  "  looking  into." 

It  does.  I  have  looked  into  it  rather  carefully  and 
with  curiosity  sharpened  by  the  fine  things  that  have 
been  said  about  it.  An  honest  and  benevolent  critic 
ought,  however,  to  indicate  clearly  from  what  point  of 
view  it  will  bear  inspection.  It  will  be  a  kindness  to 
readers  who  wish  to  keep  in  touch  with  the  really 
"  great "  living  writers  to  say  frankly  what  sort  of 
readers  will  not  be  able  to  bear  looking  into  it.  The 
first  sort  are  those  who  accept  the  traditional  view  of 
the  Bible  and  the  life  of  Jesus:  to  them  The  Brook 
Keriih  can  be  nothing  but  an  impudent  and  detestable 
profanation  of  the  sanctuary.  The  second  sort  are 
those  who,  without  accepting  all  the  traditional  views 
of  the  Bible  and  the  life  of  Jesus,  preserve  a  profound 
admiration  and  reverence  for  the  founders  of  Chris- 
tianity and  for  the  poetic  truth  and  beauty  of  the  Scrip- 
ture: to  them  The  Brook  Keriih  can  hardly  fail  to 


160     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

appear  a  licentious  and  ignoble  travesty.  There  remain 
George  Moore's  followers,  to  whom  every  line  of  his  is 
precious;  and  there  remain  those  who  can,  in  the  case 
of  a  "  great  "  living  writer,  put  aside  their  own  religious 
and  literary  predilections,  and  yield  to  their  quite  un- 
holy curiosity  to  know  what  a  man  like  George  Moore 
can  have  to  say  about  Jesus. 

The  book  leaves  no  doubt  that  Mr.  Moore  has  for 
many  years  done  a  good  deal  of — I  will  not  say,  of 
thinking.  Mr.  Moore  does  not  think ;  he  muses.  That, 
for  persons  of  musing  temperament,  is  the  charm  of  his 
later  manner.  He  has  then,  I  say,  done  a  great  deal  of 
musing  about  his  subject.  For  some  reason,  Jesus  is  a 
phenomenon  that  has  disturbed  his  equanimity.  The 
Beatitudes,  the  Crucifixion,  the  Resurrection  have  been 
obstacles  to  the  equable  flow  of  his  naturalistic  revery. 
The  "  cross,"  the  "  crown,"  "  renunciation,"  "  self-sac- 
rifice," "  redemption  " — all  these  knotty  ideas  and  sym- 
bols of  our  need  of  a  spiritual  life  and  of  the  means  of 
attaining  it  have  puzzled  George  Moore,  have  annoyed 
him,  have  almost  forced  him  to  think.  But  Mr.  Moore 
does  not  like  to  think;  it  is  contrary  to  the  stream  of 
his  tendency.  And  why,  he  "  mutters "  to  himself, 
should  one  do  what  one  does  not  like?  Why,  he  muses, 
should  one  go  against  the  stream  of  one's  tendency? 
Have  not  all  great  artists  found  themselves  by  following 
their  tendency?  There  was  Degas,  for  example.  .  .  . 
Christian  tradition,  however  dwindled,  runs  counter  to, 
and  thwarts,  one's  instincts.  Clearly,  one  cannot  muse 
in  comfort  till  one  gets  this  Jesus  out  of  one's  system ! 

Novelists  and  dramatists  of  this  generation  have  tried 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     161 

various  means  to  get  the  spiritual  Jesus  of  the  gospels 
out  of  their  systems.  Oscar  Wilde  exorcised  the  spirit- 
ual Jesus  by  repeating  to  himself  that  it  was  an  exqui- 
site Pre-Raphaelitish  aesthete  who  walked  in  the  Garden 
of  Gethsemane.  Others  have  accomplished  the  same  end 
by  repeating  to  themselves  that  it  was  an  anarchist,  a 
socialist,  a  humanitarian  enthusiast.  George  Moore 
must  have  mused  on  these  modern  literary  exorcisms  till 
be  became  aware  that  all  methods  have  one  common  ele- 
ment ;  any  one  who  desires  to  rid  himself  of  the  obsession 
of  the  spiritual  Jesus  has  but  to  put  his  own  natural 
instinctive  self  in  the  place  of  Jesus.  The  substitution 
brings  instant  relief  from  the  pressure  upon  the  con- 
sciousness of  an  exacting  alien  force.  Thus,  when  Mr. 
Moore  has  performed  this  substitution  and  has  converted 
Jesus  of  Nazareth  into  a  sentimental  Irish  naturalist  of 
our  own  day,  he  is  no  longer  troubled  by  the  hallucina- 
tion of  a  voice  calling :  "  Follow  me."  The  voice  says 
now :  "  Follow  your  inclinations  " — which,  of  course,  is 
precisely  what  he  was  "  getting  at." 

Mr.  Moore  creates  the  Moore-ish  Jesus  of  this  curious 
fiction  untrammelled  by  the  spirit  or  the  letter  of  the 
gospel  narratives.  His  Jesus  does  not  die  on  the  cross, 
but  is  removed  from  it  alive,  and  is  slowly  nursed  back 
to  health  in  the  house  of  Joseph  of  Arimathasa.  It  is 
shortly  after  the  descent  from  the  cross  and  during  the 
convalescence  that  the  following  conversation  takes 
place : 

Joseph  asked,  not  because  he  was  interested  in  dog  breed- 
ing, but  to  make  talk,  if  the  puppies  were  mongrels.  Mon- 


162     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

grels,  Jesus  repeated  overlooking  them ;  not  altogether  mon- 
grels, three-quarter  bred;  the  dog  that  begot  them  was  a 
mongrel,  half  Syrian,  half  Thracian.  I've  seen  worse  dogs 
highly  prized.  Send  the  bitch  to  a  dog  of  pure  Thracian 
stock  and  thou'lt  get  some  puppies  that  will  be  the  sort  that 
I  used  to  seek. 

This  is  not  the  most  nor  the  least  quotable  of  the 
innumerable  passages  by  which  our  ingenious  author 
gives  to  his  narration  a  kind  of  sex-interest  in  which 
the  gospel  story  is  quite  deficient.  When  the  continu- 
ance of  Jesus  in  Jerusalem  becomes  dangerous,  Joseph 
sends  him  into  the  hills  by  the  brook  Kerith.  There, 
among  the  ascetic  Essenes,  with  whom  he  had  lived  be- 
fore he  went  out  to  preach,  he  dwells  as  a  shepherd  for 
some  twenty  years,  busily  occupied  in  improving  the 
stock  by  a  judicious  selection  of  rams,  but  finding  occa- 
sion to  muse  from  time  to  time  on  the  events  of  the 
past — composing,  so  to  speak,  his  Memoirs  of  My  Dead 
Life.  In  these  pastoral  musings  among  the  hills,  he  ex- 
hibits all  George  Moore's  mental  manners  or  manner- 
isms— picks  up  a  definite  theme,  toys  with  it,  strays 
from  it,  loses  the  thread,  drifts  off  on  the  stream  of  rev- 
ery,  and  perhaps  eventually  drifts  back  again.  It  is  not 
to  be  wondered  at  that  this  somewhat  languid  form  of 
mental  activity  brings  him  ultimately  around  to  Mr. 
Moore's  own  "  intellectual  position."  Here  is  a  selec- 
tion of  his  sayings  and  musings  on  pages  365  and  366 : 

Repentance  changes  nothing,  it  brings  nothing  unless 
grief  peradventure.  ...  I  used,  he  said,  to  despise  the 
air  I  breathed,  and  long  for  the  airs  of  paradise,  but  what 
did  these  longings  bring  me? — grief.  God  bade  us  live  on 


'AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE      163 

earth  and  we  bring  unhappiness  upon  ourselves  by  desiring 
heaven.  Jesus  stopped,  and  looking  through  the  blue  air 
of  evening,  he  could  see  the  shepherds  eating  their  bread 
and  garlic  on  the  hillside.  .  .  .  His  thoughts  began  again, 
flowing  like  a  wind.  ...  In  the  desert  he  had  looked  for 
God  in  the  flowers  that  the  sun  called  forth  and  in  the 
clouds  that  the  wind  shepherded,  and  he  had  learnt  to  prize 
the  earth  and  live  content  among  his  sheep,  all  things  being 
the  gift  of  God  and  his  holy  will.  He  had  not  placed  him- 
self above  the  flowers  and  grasses  of  the  earth,  nor  the 
sheep  that  fed  upon  them,  nor  above  the  men  that  fed  upon 
the  sheep.  .  .  .  Rites  and  observances,  all  that  comes  under 
the  name  of  religion,  estranges  us  from  God,  he  repeated. 
God  is  not  here,  nor  there,  but  everywhere:  in  the  flower, 
and  in  the  star,  and  in  the  earth  under  foot.  .  .  .  But 
shall  we  gather  the  universal  will  into  an  image  and  call  it 
God? — for  by  doing  this  do  we  not  drift  back  to  the  start- 
ing place  of  all  our  misery  ?  We  again  become  the  dupes  of 
illusion  and  desire;  God  and  his  heaven  are  our  old  enemies 
in  disguise.  He  who  yields  himself  to  God  goes  forth  to 
persuade  others  to  love  God,  and  very  soon  his  love  of  God 
impels  him  to  violent  ends  and  cruel  deeds.  It  cannot  be 
else,  for  God  is  but  desire;  and  whosoever  yields  to  de- 
sire falls  into  sin.  To  be  without  sin  we  must  be  without 
God.  .  .  .  Jesus  stood  before  the  door  of  the  cenoby, 
.  .  .  asking  himself  if  any  man  had  dared  to  ask  himself 
if  God  were  not  indeed  the  last  uncleanliness  of  the  mind. 
(My  italics:  the  "daring"  of  the  question  reminds  one 
rather  less  of  Jesus  than  of  the  talented  poet-editor  of  the 
Vaterland.} 

The  foregoing  passage  gives  us  the  positive  or  "  con- 
structive "  message  of  the  book.  TEis  soft,  sentimental, 
pseudo-pantheism  is  no  doubt  really  Mr.  Moore's? 
When  he  expresses  it,  he  speaks  with  as  much  sincerity 
as  the  chary  gods  have  vouchsafed  to  him.  It  is  when 


164     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

he  is  steeped  to  the  lips  in  a  vague  sweet  sense  that  there 
is  no  difference  between  him  and  a  flower — it  is  in  such 
moments  that  he  writes  the  "  delicious  "  half-pages  that 
persuade  even  schone  Seelen  that  he  is  the  greatest 
master  of  English  since  Thackeray.  It  is  when  he  is  in 
the  grip  of  a  vague  sense  that  there  is  no  difference  be- 
tween him  and  a  sheep  or,  let  us  say,  one  of  the  Essene 
rams  which  so  much  solicit  his  attention — it  is  in  such 
moments  that  he  writes  the  sly  half-pages  which  per- 
suade some  of  us  that  he  is  not  far  from  right:  that 
there  is  probably  no  very  great  difference  between  his 
religion  and  that  of  the  sheep.  And  so  one  comes  back 
to  a  sense  that  a  religion  which  helps  a  man  make  the 
distinction  between  himself  and  a  flower  has  a  certain 
usefulness  yet. 

Revenons  a  nos — let  us  return  to  Mr.  Moore's  Jesus. 
His  musing  by  the  brook  Kerith  has  a  destructive  tend- 
ency along  with  its  benevolent  sentimentality.  He  muses 
slowly  to  the  conclusion  that  his  great  mission  was  a 
mistake ;  that  a  large  part  of  his  teaching  was  fanatical ; 
that  his  renunciation  of  the  earthly  life  was  perverse; 
that  his  presentation  of  himself  as  the  Messiah  was  im- 
posture. Finally,  in  the  assembly  of  the  Essenes,  he 
confesses  his  sins.  Conducted  by  a  master-confessor, 
the  recital  is  rather  prolix.  Here  is  part  of  the  con- 
fession : 

I  fear  to  speak  of  the  things  I  said  at  that  time,  but  I 
must  speak  of  them.  One  man  asked  me  before  he  left  all 
things  to  follow  me  if  he  might  not  bury  his  father  first.  I 
answered,  leave  the  dead  to  bury  their  dead,  and  to  another 
who  said,  my  hand  is  at  the  plough,  may  I  not  drive  it  to  the 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE      165 

headland,  I  answered:  leave  all  things  and  follow  me.  My 
teaching  grew  more  and  more  violent.  It  is  not  peace,  I 
said,  that  I  bring  you,  but  a  sword,  and  I  come  as  a  brand 
wherewith  to  set  the  world  in  flame.  ...  It  seems  to  me 
that  in  telling  the  story,  brethren,  I  am  doing  but  the  work 
of  God:  no  man  strays  very  far  from  the  work  that  God 
has  decreed  to  him.  But  in  the  time  I  am  telling  I  was 
so  exalted  by  the  many  miracles  which  I  had  per- 
formed by  the  power  of  God  or  the  power  of  a  demon,  I 
know  not  which,  that  I  encouraged  my  disciples  to  speak  of 
me  as  the  son  of  David,  though  I  knew  myself  to  be  the  son 
of  Joseph  the  carpenter;  and  when  I  rode  into  Jerusalem 
and  the  people  strewed  palms  before  me  and  called  out,  the 
son  of  David,  and  Joseph  said  to  me,  let  them  not  call  thee 
the  son  of  David,  I  answered  in  my  pride,  if  they  did  not 
call  it  forth  the  stones  themselves  would.  ...  A  day 
passed  in  great  exaltation  and  hope,  and  one  evening  I 
took  bread  and  broke  it,  saying  that  I  was  the  bread  of  life 
that  came  down  from  heaven  and  that  whosoever  ate  of  it 
had  everlasting  life  given  to  him.  After  saying  these  words 
a  great  disquiet  fell  upon  me,  and  calling  my  disciples  to- 
gether I  asked  them  to  come  to  the  garden  of  olives  with  me. 
And  it  was  while  asking  God's  forgiveness  for  my  blas- 
phemies that  the  emissaries  and  agents  of  the  Priests  came 
and  took  me  prisoner. 

The  "  great  situation  "  in  the  book  is  the  confronta- 
tion of  Jesus  with  the  apostle  Paul.  He  staggers  into 
the  cenoby  of  the  Essenes  one  night,  full  of  the  "  glad 
tidings  of  the  resurrection  "  which  he  has  been  preaching 
from  Damascus  to  Jerusalem.  He  is  present  through 
part  of  .the  confession  of  Jesus,  but  imagines  that  he  is 
listening  to  a  madman,  and  is  himself  seized  with  a  fit 
in  the  midst  of  the  disclosure.  Jesus  makes  several 
efforts  later  to  persuade  Paul  that  he  is  indeed  the  cruci- 


166     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

fied  Nazarene ;  but  Paul  departs  utterly  incredulous  and 
unmoved,  and  goes  on  his  way,  proclaiming  the  risen 
Lord.  Jesus  had  intended  to  return  to  Jerusalem,  and 
to  destroy  his  following  by  exploding  his  "  legend." 
But  having  seen  how  Paul  has  set  his  heart  on  the  resur- 
rection idea,  he  hates  to  do  it;  he  does  not  do  it;  he 
simply  disappears,  leaving  Paul  uncontradicted  to 
preach  his  colossal  error  throughout  the  earth — "  be- 
cause," as  one  admiring  reviewer  has  put  it,  "  because 
in  his  gentleness  he  cannot  give  so  much  pain  " ! 

I  can  think  of  but  one  passage  in  literature  which 
equals  this  in  its  special  quality.  That  is  the  pas- 
sage in  Tristram  Shandy  where  Uncle  Toby  picks 
up  the  fly  which  has  tormented  him  cruelly  all  dinner- 
time :  "  I'll  not  hurt  thee,  says  my  Uncle  Toby,  rising 
from  his  chair,  and  going  across  the  room  with  the  fly 
in  his  hand — I'll  not  hurt  a  hair  of  thy  head : — go — says 
he,  lifting  up  the  sash,  and  opening  his  hand  as  he  spoke 
to  let  it  escape; — go,  poor  devil,  get  thee  gone,  why 
should  I  hurt  thee? — This  world  surely  is  wide  enough 
to  hold  both  thee  and  me."  If  Jesus  were  the  senti- 
mentalist that  Mr.  Moore  depicts  him,  one  could  imag- 
ine him  tossing  his  Irish  "  apologist "  out  the  window 
with  the  remark  that  Uncle  Toby  addressed  to  the  fly. 

We  owe  the  same  debt  of  attention  to  Mr.  Moore  that 
we  should  owe  to  a  man  who  should  push  his  boat  into 
the  river  above  Niagara  Falls,  ship  his  oars,  and  submit 
to  the  will  of  the  waters ;  he  would  demonstrate  the  force 
and  consequences  of  the  current.  Mr.  Moore  has  shot 
the  falls  of  naturalism.  We  were  acquainted  with  its 
clear  spring  in  the  high  mountain  home,  where  Words- 


AESTHETIC  NATURALISM  OF  MOORE     167 

worth,  drinking,  vowed  himself  "  well  pleased  to  recog- 
nize in  nature  and  the  language  of  the  sense,  the  author 
of  his  purest  thoughts,  the  nurse,  the  guide,  the 
guardian  of  his  heart,  and  soul  of  all  his  moral  being." 
We  had  seen  Wordsworth's  pleasant  faith  in  the  con- 
currence of  nature  with  the  moral  ends  of  man  elab- 
orately clothed  in  the  fiction  of  George  Meredith's 
Richard  Feverel,  specifically  in  the  chapter  entitled 
"  Nature  Speaks."  We  had  seen  in  the  work  of 
Thomas  Hardy  the  sweet  pantheistic  illusion  give  way 
to  tragic  insight  into  the  actual  relationship  existing 
between  nature  and  society.  He,  too,  recognized  in 
nature  a  power  that  molds  the  characters  and  destinies 
of  men.  But  it  was  not  clear  to  him  that  an  impulse 
from  a  vernal  wood  would  always  send  a  Peter  Bell  to 
church  or  an  errant  father  to  his  child ;  it  seemed  quite 
as  likely  that  it  would  send  a  Jude  to  an  Arabella  or  a 
Tess  to  an  Alec.  It  appeared,  in  brief,  to  his  vision 
that  this  blind  power  which  moves  through  all  things, 
though  occasionally  coinciding  with  human  law,  urges 
men  on  to  the  fulfilment  of  its  own  tendencies,  irrespec- 
tive of  the  disasters  which  may  consequently  befall  them 
in  that  social  order  established  and  regulated  by  reason 
and  foresight.  Because,  however,  he  is  fully  aware  of 
the  resolute  power  perpetually  conflicting  with  the  in- 
cessant pressure  of  instinct,  naturalism  attains  in  him 
to  tragedy.  His  grim  symbol  of  nature  and  the  morality 
of  society  is  Tess  of  the  D'Urbervilles  swinging  on  the 
gallows.  After  Hardy,  to  speak  of  the  concurrence  of 
nature  in  the  moral  ends  of  man  becomes  impossible. 
We  have  reached  the  fork  in  the  road ;  we  must  turn  to 


168     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

the  right  with  reason  to  guide  us  into  the  walled  and 
steepled  cities  and  the  civil  life  of  our  kind,  or  turn  to 
the  left  and  trust  to  instinct. 

Mr.  Moore  turned  to  the  left.  In  a  few  strides 
he  passed  beyond  good  and  evil  into  that  wilderness 
where  birds  and  cantatrices  sing,  where  wild  creatures 
conceive  and  aesthetes  confess,  where  every  creeping 
thing  brings  forth  its  young,  and  the  simple  serv- 
ant girl,  having  given  to  the  world  a  natural  son, 
lives  happy  ever  after  in  the  consciousness  that  she 
has  accomplished  that  whereunto  she  was  sent.  In 
this  Arcadian  world  there  is  neither  comedy  nor  trag- 
edy; for  there  is  neither  passion  nor  joy,  conflict 
nor  climax,  reconciliation  nor  catastrophe:  there  are 
only  the  flush  and  fading  of  sensual  excitement,  the 
vicissitudes  of  wind  and  weather,  the  progress  of  the 
seasons,  and  the  cyclic  changes  of  birth  and  death.  Mr. 
Moore  is  right  in  regarding  his  life  as  more  significant 
than  any  of  his  works.  When  a  man  of  great  talent  has 
made  his  mind  a  courtesan  to  nature,  the  only  tragedy 
that  he  can  write  is  his  confession.  When  a  man  has 
shaken  off  the  bonds  that  united  him  with  civil  society, 
the  only  confession  that  he  can  make  of  significance 
to  civil  readers  is  that  such  emancipation  is  exile.  What, 
then,  does  George  Moore  mean  by  telling  us  that  beneath 
his  frivolous  mask  is  concealed  a  tragic  actor? 


VI 

THE  SKEPTICISM  OF  ANATOLE  FRANCE 

JULES  LEMAITRE,  one  of  the  most  delicately  apprecia- 
tive of  French  critics,  thus  defined  for  himself  the  charm 
of  Anatole  France :  "  I  feel  the  saturation  of  his  work 
with  all  its  antecedents;  I  find  in  it  the  latest  state  of 
the  human  consciousness." 

His  work  thus  accomplishes  what  Mona  Lisa,  accord- 
ing to  Pater,  accomplishes  in  art — "  the  summing  up  in 
itself  all  modes  of  thought  and  life."  One  escapes  in 
his  books  from  the  shallow  and  savorless  modernity  of 
contemporary  literature.  He  is  a  cosmopolitan  not 
merely  of  the  present  year  of  grace ;  he  was  a  citizen  of 
the  world  before  the  Christian  era.  A  leisurely  aristo- 
crat, polished,  imperturbable,  he  has  strolled  with  ironic 
smile  among  the  neglected  ruins  of  antiquity,  and  has 
reanimated  their  fallen  splendor.  He  has  walked  under 
the  plane  trees  without  the  city  wall  conversing  with 
Socrates  and  the  Sophists  on  the  reality  of  our  ideas. 
He  has  discussed  Greek  philosophy  in  the  Tusculan 
villa  with  Cicero,  has  sauntered  over  the  Aventine  chat- 
ting with  Horace,  and  has  listened  with  bowed  head 
while  Virgil  read  to  the  grief-stricken  household  his 
divine  praise  of  the  young  Marcellus.  He  observed  the 
strange  star  in  the  East,  heard  the  stories  of  Lazarus 
and  Magdalen,  and  dined  with  Pilate,  Procurator  of 

169 


170     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

Judea.  In  the  Egyptian  desert  he  occupied  a  cell  with 
the  Christian  cenobites;  in  Alexandria  he  tasted  the 
last  luxuries  of  the  pagan  world.  He  caught  from  the 
catacombs  the  fervent  murmur  of  prayer  and  the  mys- 
terious hymns  of  the  martyrs.  He  saw  with  a  regret- 
ful smile  nymphs  and  dryads  and  fauns  at  twilight 
scurrying  through  country  woodlands  in  terror  of  the 
cathedral  bell.  A  lover  of  masquerade,  he  has  crept 
into  the  cassock  of  mediaeval  monks,  and  gravely  an- 
nounced the  performance  of  miracles,  or  discoursed 
upon  the  lusts  of  the  flesh  and  the  pride  of  life,  or  whiled 
away  long  hours  on  a  settle  in  the  cloister  splitting  the- 
ological hairs  with  the  church  fathers.  Especially,  has 
he  haunted  the  steps  of  the  Brides  of  Christ,  irresistibly 
drawn  by  the  allurement  of  their  celestial  roses,  hoping, 
perhaps,  to  catch  a  drop  of  the  spilled  milk  of  Para- 
dise. And  all  this  he  has  told,  not  as  one  passing  fever- 
ishly through  successive  stages  of  intellectual  intoxica- 
tion, but  as  one  sitting  at  ease  and  leaning  indolently 
out  from  a  casement  in  Elysium. 

More  fascinating  than  all  this  selected  world-experi- 
ence is  the  point  of  view  of  the  narrator.  He  keeps  us 
wondering  where  he  is.  The  detachment  of  M.  France 
is  not  that  of  Flaubert  or  of  Maupassant.  The  realist 
withdraws  a  little  from  his  object  to  gain  the  proper 
focus  for  his  microscope.  He  is  nevertheless  savagely 
absorbed  in  it.  He  means  to  bring  it  home  to  us,  to 
make  us  enter  into  it  and  feel  it  tingling  in  our  five 
senses.  M.  France,  on  the  other  hand,  seeks  in  general 
to  tranquilize  the  senses.  When  I  say  this,  I  do  not 
forget  the  vein  of  cold  salacity  which  runs  through  his 


SKEPTICISM  OF  ANATOLE  FRANCE     171 

works.  In  presenting  the  simian  proclivities  of  man  he 
maintains  an  air  of  smiling  aloofness.  He  contemplates 
the  troubled  face  of  the  world  through  serene  leagues  of 
motionless  ether.  He  will  report  mundane  affairs  not 
to  the  prurient  ears  of  mortals,  but  to  the  gods  of  Epi- 
curus who  inhabit  the  quiet  above  the  clouds  and  winds, 
and  feel  from  time  to  time  a  mild  amusement  in  the 
human  spectacle.  Passing  beyond  the  flaming  ramparts 
of  the  world,  he  would  enter  the  celestial  hall  where  the 
blithe  Immortals  revel,  crying :  O  Shining  Ones,  let  me, 
a  mortal,  share  your  feast.  I  have  withdrawn  my  heart 
and  hope  from  the  miserable  race  of  men.  For  they 
come  out  of  the  darkness  and  struggle  like  beasts  in  the 
brief  light  and  go  into  the  darkness  again.  All  their 
achievements  are  but  as  the  excellencies  of  worms  differ- 
ing among  one  another.  They  are  rent  with  a  love  more 
cruel  than  the  grave.  They  are  burnt  in  the  fire  of  their 
own  flesh.  They  are  terrified  by  the  shadows  which  they 
cast  upon  eternity.  But  I — I  have  learned  the  secret 
of  your  immortal  calm.  I  have  found  that  there  is 
peace  for  those  who  are  content  to  perceive  and  not  to 
possess  the  world.  I  have  learned  to  look  upon  the 
labors  of  Hercules  without  an  impulse  to  lift  a  finger, 
upon  the  temptations  of  St.  Anthony  with  no  stirring 
of  the  flesh,  upon  the  crucifixion  of  the  martyrs  with 
scarcely  a  throb  of  sympathetic  pain.  To  the  ego  wisely 
isolated  from  the  contagious  fevers  of  existence  all  these 
things  are  but  as  the  fierce  vexation  of  a  dream.  Make 
me,  therefore,  a  place  beside  you,  and  I  will  tell  you 
tales  of  men,  provoking  supernal  mirth. 

If  one  rereads  the  works  of  M.  France  in  the  English 


172     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

translation,  one  unconsciously  associates  each  succes- 
sive volume  with  the  bland  and  laurelled  old  Epicurean 
stamped  in  gold  upon  the  cover.  Even  with  the  trans- 
lator's note  reminding  us  that  the  volume  entitled 
Jocasta  and  the  Famished  Cat  was  his  first  venture  in 
fiction,  originally  published  in  1879,  it  is  difficult  to 
think  of  the  author  as  a  young  writer,  for  already  he  is 
surveying  his  contemporaries  in  their  keenest  self- 
absorption  with  the  cool  detachment  of  an  old  resident 
in  the  ivory  tower.  Jocasta  appeared  in  the  heyday  of 
naturalism  two  years  after  L'Assommoir,  and  in  its  ele- 
ments it  is  an  ugly  piece  of  bourgeois  tragedy  with  a 
sentimental  heroine  hanging  herself  in  a  bathhouse  with 
her  nephew's  necktie,  loved  by  a  young  surgeon  who 
analyzes  his  sensations  and  dissects  the  nervous  system 
of  frogs.  In  the  hands  of  almost  any  other  writer  of  his 
generation  this  material  would  have  taken  shape  as  a 
depressing  "  human  document  "  illustrative  of  a  me- 
chanical theory  of  life.  But  M.  France  has  never  grimly 
adopted  the  mechanical  theory  of  life;  he  has  only 
played  with  it  and  amused  himself  with  the  spectacle  of 
those  who  were  in  the  grip  of  it.  "  A  delightfully  novel 
basis  for  composition,"  he  seems  to  murmur  to  himself, 
"  in  this  notion  of  scientifically  dissecting  the  nervous 
system  of  frogs  and  heroines.  Let  us  see  what  can  be 
made  of  it."  The  air  of  artifice,  of  technical  experi- 
mentation, removes,  for  my  sense,  the  sting  of  actuality ; 
so  that  the  suicide  of  the  modern  heroine  affects  me  less 
than  a  knife  thrust  in  an  old  tale  of  Boccaccio.  It 
affects  me  rather  like  a  demonstration  in  geometry  or 
the  last  move  in  a  game  of  chess. 


SKEPTICISM  OF  ANATOLE  FRANCE     173 

Still,  if  this  somber  matter  has  left  a  bad  taste  in  the 
mouth,  one  has  only  to  turn  the  page  and  forget  the 
sordid  sorrows  of  Philistines  in  a  gorgeous  chronicle 
of  the  picturesque  denizens  of  the  Latin  Quarter  who 
foregathered  at  the  sign  of  the  Famished  Cat.  "  No 
one  who  is  sane  affords  me  much  amusement,"  quotes 
M.  France  with  approval ;  and,  as  he  sees  it,  all  Bohemia 
wears  motley.  From  the  windows  of  the  ivory  tower 
he  looks  down  upon  the  poetical  enthusiast  in  his 
garret  no  less  than  upon  the  scientific  enthusiast  in  his 
laboratory.  Yet  though  he  preserves  here  his  attitude 
of  aloofness,  he  portrays  his  troop  of  intoxicated  origi- 
nals with  an  incomparable  zest  in  their  idiosyncrasies, 
and  with  a  mellowness  of  mirth  that  suggest  an  only 
half-extinguished  sympathy.  Labanne,  the  sculptor, 
who  thinks  he  must  read  fifteen  hundred  volumes  on 
the  pigmentum  of  the  black  races  and  the  geological 
formation  of  the  Antilles  before  he  can  touch  clay 
for  his  statue  of  Black  Liberty,  must  occupy  a  warm 
place  in  his  creator's  learned  heart.  Indeed,  the  door 
of  Labanne's  studio,  with  its  strange  conflict  of  inscrip- 
tions carved  and  chalked  by  "  various  people,"  will  seem 
to  some  readers  almost  to  epitomize  M.  France's  bewil- 
dering "  criticism  of  life."  These  are  some  of  the 
inscriptions : 

"  Womkn  is  more  bitter  than  death." 

"  Academicians    are    all   bourgeois,   Cabanel   is    a   hair- 
dresser's assistant." 
"  Laud  we  the  womanly  form,  which  still,  as  of  old,  uplifts 

Chants  hieratic,  in  praise  of  the  greatest  of  beauty's  gifts. 

—Paul  Dion." 


174 

"  I  have  brought  back  the  clean  linen.  Monday  I  will 
call  for  the  dirty  at  the  porter's  lodge." 

"Athens,  ever  venerable  city,  if  thou  hadst  not  existed, 
the  world  would  not  yet  know  the  meaning  of  beauty." 

"  Labanne  is  a  rat.  I  don't  care  a  damn  for  him. 

— Maria." 

And  there  were  many  others  on  the  door. 

The  career  of  Thai's,  a  fair  Alexandrian  courtesan 
of  the  fourth  century,  offered  unusual  attractions  to  the 
feasting  eye  of  the  philosophic  angel.  No  other  writer 
has  realized  so  completely — so  deliriously,  as  a  disciple 
of  Renan  would  say — certain  artistic  possibilities  in 
ecclesiastical  history  and  the  legends  of  saints  and  mar- 
tyrs. With  few  exceptions,  romances  in  English  con- 
cerned with  the  lives  of  the  early  Christians  are  to  any 
but  juvenile  readers  extremely  insipid.  It  must  be  ad- 
mitted that  an  ulterior  religious  purpose  seldom  seems 
entirely  favorable  to  the  art  of  fiction.  Cardinal  New- 
man wrote  his  pallid  and  long-forgotten  romances  in  a 
religious  ascetic's  revulsion  from  paganism  and  with  an 
eye  to  furthering  the  cause  of  Rome.  Kingsley,  with  a 
more  virile  art,  wrote  with  a  keen  detestation  of  ascetic- 
ism and  with  a  special  pleasure  in  barking  at  Newman. 
Anatole  France,  perhaps  knowing  as  much  about  certain 
aspects  of  the  saints  as  Newman,  and  certainly  knowing 
as  much  about  sinners  as  Kingsley,  aspires  to  write  of 
both  like  a  philosophical  angel,  hovering  a  little  above 
the  earth,  spectator  of  everything,  participator  in  noth- 
ing. The  belief  and  the  unbelief  of  Gentile  and  Jew 
concern  him  not  at  all  save  as  they  offer  to  the  aesthetic 
sense  some  new  note  of  intensity,  some  unexploited 


SKEPTICISM  OF  ANATOLE  FRANCE     175 

mingling  of  strangeness  with  beauty.  It  is  difficult  to 
say  whether  he  enters  with  more  penetrating  and  illumi- 
nating curiosity  into  the  life  of  the  Alexandrian  beauty 
and  her  favorites  set  in  the  dazzling  luxury  of  the  wicked 
city,  or  into  the  gaunt  soul  and  body  of  the  stylite 
Paphnutius  ringed  by  the  tombs  and  the  desert.  The 
picturesque  qualities  of  both  engage  him,  but  from  both 
he  preserves  a  complete  spiritual  detachment.  In  the  end, 
however,  the  mask  slips  a  little  from  the  observant  angel, 
and  reveals  the  smile  of  the  lurking  cynic.  It  is  made 
perfectly  clear  that  Thai's  turned  toward  heaven  merely 
from  satiety  of  the  flesh,  and  that  Paphnutius  turned 
toward  hell  merely  from  satiety  of  the  spirit — a  con- 
clusion sufficiently  devoid  of  edification.  There  is  not 
one  breath  of  genuine  holiness  in  the  book.  Yet  for 
piquancy  of  attack,  for  malicious  insight  into  the  psy- 
chology of  the  anchorite,  and  for  sheer  brilliancy  of  rep- 
resentation there  is  nothing  like  this  in  English. 

M.  France  is  one  of  the  innumerable  champions  of 
intellectual  emancipation  who  have  compromised  the 
cause  of  liberty  by  their  libertinism.  He  will  pay  his 
penalty  in  the  inevitable  reaction.  Inspired  by  a  quite 
righteous  indignation  against  his  subtle  voluptuousness 
and  his  moral  impotence,  various  French  critics  1  have 
in  recent  years  attempted  to  damage  or  to  destroy  his 
reputation  as  a  creative  artist.  His  work,  they  tell  us, 
is  deficient  in  originality;  it  is  but  a  superlatively  bril- 

1  See.  for  example,  Giraud's  Maitres  de  I'Heure,  Michaut's 
Anatole  France,  and  compare  Gu£rard's  Five  Masters  of  French 
Romance.  An  interesting  review  of  recent  critical  literature 
appears  in  an  article  by  D.  S.  Blondheim  in  Modern  Philology, 
July,  1916. 


176     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

liant  pastiche.  A  writer  whose  work  is  saturated,  as 
M.  Lemaitre  says,  with  everything  that  has  preceded 
it  lays  himself  open  to  that  sort  of  attack ;  and  it  must 
be  admitted  that  many  of  his  volumes  are  very  loosely 
composed.  Some  of  his  books,  nevertheless,  will  last  as 
long  as  men  continue  to  read  Lucian,  Boccaccio,  Rabe- 
lais, Voltaire.  Sylvestre  Bonnard  has  already  estab- 
lished itself  as  a  student's  classic.  At  the  Sign  of  the 
Reine  Pedauque  will  probably  never  attain  that  honor — 
and  for  "  good  and  sufficient  "  reasons ;  but  it  is  likely 
to  live  without  that  aid.  When  you  have  turned  the 
last  page,  you  will  recognize  that  the  work  belongs  on 
the  Index,  you  may  think  that  it  should  be  supplied  with 
an  appendix  like  Don  Juan's  classics,  you  may  pitch  it 
into  the  fire,  chuckling  like  the  delighted  monastic 
censors  in  the  painting.  But  you  know  very  well  that 
you  cannot  put  an  end  to  the  abounding  life  that  is  in 
Monsieur  PAbbe  Jerome  Coignard  and  his  reverent 
pupil  Tournebroche.  With  all  their  gross  imperfec- 
tions on  their  heads  they  are  marked,  like  Tom  Jones 
and  Falstaff,  for  immortality.  The  English  parallels 
are  very  inadequate.  Tom  Jones  is  only  a  spirited 
young  animal.  Falstaff  resembles  the  abbe  in  his  girth, 
his  geniality,  his  drunkenness,  his  larceny,  his  carnality, 
and  his  sentimentality;  and  yet,  after  all,  Falstaff  is 
but  an  amiable  brutal  Englishman  without  culture  or 
philosophy  other  than  that  which  we  attribute  nowa- 
days to  the  man  in  the  street.  Jerome  Coignard  par- 
takes heartily  of  the  common  sinful  humanity  of  Sir 
John,  but  he  includes,  besides,  within  his  ample  sphere, 
nearly  everything  that  his  creator  finds  to  love,  pity, 


SKEPTICISM  OF  ANATOLE  FRANCE     177 

and  deride  in  the  civilization  of  the  ancients,  the  Latin 
Christianity  filtered  through  the  Middle  Ages,  and  the 
rationalism  of  the  early  eighteenth  century.  He  is  one 
of  the  richly  endowed  rogues  of  whom  one  says,  "  Of 
course  he  is  an  unspeakable  rascal,  yet  you  can't  resist 
him." 

Ex-priest,  ex-professor  of  eloquence  in  the  college  of 
Beauvais,  ex-librarian  to  the  bishop  of  Seez,  author  of 
a  translation  of  Zozimus  the  Panopolitan,  this  wine- 
drinking,  wenching,  mellow-hearted  debauchee  is,  like 
M.  France  himself,  a  follower  at  the  same  time  of  Epi- 
curus and  Saint  Francis  of  Assisi.  A  child  of  the  "  en- 
lightenment "  before  the  Encyclopaedists  and  a  disciple 
of  Descartes,  he  keeps  his  religion  and  his  philosophy  in 
water-tight  compartments :  "  Jacques  Tournebroche,  my 
son,  be  mindful  never  to  put  faith  in  absurdities,  but  to 
bring  everything  to  the  test  of  reason  save  in  the  matter 
of  our  holy  religion."  A  student  of  theology,  he  is 
deeply  read  in  the  Fathers,  and  when  he  is  in  the  vein, 
can  be  unctuous,  devout,  and  seriously  concerned  for  the 
salvation  of  his  soul.  He  is  also  a  classical  scholar 
versed  in  the  most  recondite  Grecian  and  Roman  authors, 
and  his  rich  table-talk  is  redolent  of  a  charming  erudi- 
tion; but,  when  he  is  buried  in  a  library  and  weary  of 
labor  and  devotion,  he  does  not  hesitate  to  indulge  his 
powerful  sensuality  in  fare  fitter  for  Trimalchio's  feast 
than  for  the  provender  of  a  man  of  God.  Escaping 
with  stolen  diamonds  and  some  bottles  of  white  wine 
from  a  drunken  brawl  in  which  he  has  stabbed  a  man, 
the  good  abbe  is  delayed  on  the  Lyons  road  by  the  wreck- 
ing of  his  coach,  overtaken  by  his  pursuers  at  nightfall, 


and  mortally  wounded.  Yet  he  lives  long  enough  to 
make  a  beautiful  repentance,  obtaining  salvation  in  the 
moment  of  death,  and  he  expires  in  a  pleasant  odor  of 
sanctity,  not  a  little  consoled  by  the  fact  that,  as  he  had 
been  struck  down  by  a  Jew,  he  "  perished  a  victim  to  a 
descendant  of  the  executioners  of  Christ." 

M.  France  has  given  us  his  personal  commentary  on 
the  abbe  in  a  pleasant  study  of  thirty-five  pages  pre- 
fixed to  the  companion  volume,  Les  Opinions  de  M. 
Jerome  Coignard,  published  in  the  same  year,  1893, 
with  the  Reine  Pedauque.  In  1909  he  returned  to  the 
theme  with  Les  Contes  de  Jacques  Tournebroche.  I  men- 
tion these  facts  because,  in  the  two  or  three  pages  of 
general  appreciation  with  which  Mr.  W.  J.  Locke  intro- 
duces the  English  translation,  he  does  not  mention  them. 
After  due  reflection  I  cannot  guess  why  Mr.  Locke  was 
asked  to  write  this  preface,  unless  it  was  because  he  is 
the  author  of  a  popular  book  called  The  Beloved  Vaga- 
bond. If  my  conjecture  is  correct,  he  has  neglected  a 
very  pretty  opportunity  to  acknowledge  a  debt  and  to 
discourse  on  the  differences  between  the  spirit  of  Eng- 
lish and  French  fiction.  The  relation  between  At  the 
Sign  of  the  Reine  Pedauque  and  The  Beloved  Vagabond 
is  interesting.  That  Mr.  Locke  has  borrowed  in  some 
fashion  the  happy  invention  of  Coignard  and  Tourne- 
broche — cela  saute  aux  \yeux.  He  sets  out,  just  as  M. 
France  does,  with  the  adoption  of  a  clever  boy,  engaged 
in  a  menial  occupation,  by  a  very  learned,  very  dirty, 
very  benevolent  vagabond  of  philosophical  habit;  and 
the  boy  in  each  case  writes  the  memoirs  of  the  alliance. 
But  the  two  authors  walk  only  a  short  way  together. 


SKEPTICISM  OF  ANATOLE  FRANCE      179 

Mr.  Locke's  tale  is  conceived  in  English  sentiment;  his 
philosopher  conceals  beneath  his  soiled  shirt  a  deathless 
romantic  passion.  M.  France's  tale  is  conceived  in 
philosophical  irony  and  Gallic  cynicism ;  beneath  all  his 
classical  and  Christian  culture,  M.  Jerome  Coignard  is 
a  sensualist,  pure  and  simple — or,  more  strictly  speak- 
ing, impure  and  complex.  Mr.  Locke  would  persuade 
us  that  man  is  a  flower  that  at  heart  smells  sweet  though 
it  blossoms  in  the  dust.  M.  France,  on  the  contrary, 
would  have  us  believe  that  man  is  an  "obscene  and  evil 
fly  "  remarkably  imprisoned  in  the  amber  of  his  ideals. 

When  M.  France,  after  forty  years  of  philosophical 
romancing  in  the  garden  of  Epicurus,  published  his 
Vie  de  Jeanne  d'Arc,  the  professional  historians  were 
shocked  and  the  Epicureans  were  perplexed.  It  did  not 
seem  quite  respectful  to  the  Muse  of  History,  for  the 
author  of  Le  Lys  Rouge  to  present  her  with  the  life  of 
the  virgin  of  Domremy.  On  the  other  hand,  it  appeared 
out  of  character  for  the  author  of  M.  Jerome  Coignard 
to  take  the  scholarly  ideal  so  seriously.  To  most  of  his 
followers  his  perilous  charm  had  been  that  he  always 
seemed  to  say — Mr.  George  Santayana  has  said  it,  too, 
in  three  lines  of  a  seductive  sonnet: 

The  crown  of  olive  let  another  wear ; 

It  is  my  crown  to  mock  the  runner's  heat 

With  gentle  wonder  and  with  laughter  sweet. 

Nor  was  it  clear  what  garland  a  novice  of  over  three- 
score could  hope  to  win  in  the  trite  and  well-gleaned 
field  of  history  where  he  made  his  debut.  To  be  sure, 
some  critics  tried  to  show  that  this  work  did  not  really 


180     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

represent  a  new  departure  in  M.  France's  development; 
for,  they  said,  even  in  his  romances  he  had  been  an  his- 
torian, as  even  in  his  history  he  had  been  a  romancer. 
Both  views  are  partly  right ;  the  history  of  Jeanne  d'Arc 
was,  in  a  sense,  only  the  latest  in  a  long  series  of  natur- 
alistic and  iconoclastic  saints'  lives.  But  there  was  a 
difference.  How  explain  the  lengthy  preface  discussing 
predecessors,  theories  of  history,  original  documents? 
M.  France  had  sent  his  fine  Ariel  often  enough  among 
ancient  libraries,  but  had  never  allowed  him  to  appear 
in  the  sunlight  with  dust  on  his  wings.  What  convic- 
tion, slowly  formulating,  had  brought  this  volant,  elu- 
sive spirit,  this  mocking  beguiler  of  an  empty  day  into 
step  with  his  sober  contemporaries?  Let  us  not  attempt 
to  discover,  said  M.  Achille  Luchaire,  reviewing  the  first 
volume  of  the  work,  ne  cherchons  pas  a  penetrer  le 
mystere  de  cette  evolution. 

M.  France  has  something  of  Prosper  Merimee's  re- 
pugnance to  being  divined.  On  the  heels  of  Jeanne 
d'Arc,  as  if  anxious  to  complicate  the  chart  of  his  evolu- 
tion, he  sends  a  satirical  afterpiece,  L'lle  des  Pingouins, 
which  dissipates  in  peals  of  derisive  laughter  any  notion 
that  its  author  has  joined  the  modern  historians.  This, 
too,  is  a  history  prefaced  by  a  critical  account  of 
sources;  but,  though  shorter,  it  is  much  more  compre- 
hensive than  its  forerunner.  It  is  an  abridgment  of  all 
history  that  has  been  or  shall  be,  under  the  form  of  a 
veiled  comic  history  of  France.  "  In  spite  of  the  appar- 
ent diversity  of  the  amusements  which  seem  to  attract 
me,"  begins  the  preface  in  the  old  ironical  vein,  "  my 
life  has  only  one  object.  It  is  wholly  bent  toward  the 


SKEPTICISM  OF  ANATOLE  FRANCE     181 

accomplishment  of  one  great  design.  I  am  writing  the 
history  of  the  Penguins."  In  the  search  for  the  buried 
monuments  of  this  people,  continues  the  author,  "  I  have 
excavated  by  the  seashore  an  unviolated  tumulus;  I 
found  in  it,  according  to  custom,  stone  axes,  swords  of 
bronze,  Roman  coins,  and  a  twenty-sous  piece  with  the 
head  of  Louis-Philippe  I,  King  of  the  French." 

Embarrassed  by  difficulties  attendant  on  the  inter- 
pretation of  conflicting  evidence,  the  historian  called  in 
counsel  several  eminent  archaeologists  and  palaeograph- 
ers : — "  They  looked  at  me  with  a  smile  of  pity  which 
seemed  to  say :  *  Do  we  write  history  ?  Do  we  attempt 
to  extract  from  a  text,  from  a  document  the  least  scrap 
of  life  or  truth?  We  publish  texts  pure  and  simple. 
We  stick  to  the  letter.  The  letter  alone  is  appreciable 
and  definite.  The  spirit  is  not;  ideas  are  crotchets. 
One  must  be  very  presumptuous  to  write  history;  one 
must  have  imagination.* '  A  surviving  historian  of  the 
old  school  was  more  encouraging — "  Why  take  the 
trouble  to  compose  a  history  when  you  have  only  to 
copy  the  standard  works,  as  every  one  does.  .  .  .  One 
word  more.  If  you  wish  your  book  to  be  welcomed,  neg- 
lect no  opportunity  to  extol  the  virtues  upon  which 
societies  are  based :  devotion  to  riches,  pious  sentiments, 
and  especially  the  resignation  of  the  poor,  which  is  the 
foundation  of  order.  Assert,  sir,  that  the  origins  of 
property,  nobility,  and  gendarmery  will  be  treated  in 
your  history  with  all  the  respect  which  these  institutions 
merit.  Have  it  understood  that  you  admit  the  super- 
natural when  it  appears.  On  that  condition  you  will 
succeed  in  good  company." — "  I  have  meditated  these 


182     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

judicious  observations,"  says  M.  France  demurely,  "  and 
have  paid  good  heed  to  them." 

The  narrative  accordingly  begins  with  the  apostolic 
calling  of  Saint  Mael,  and  his  wonderful  conversions,  his 
wide  wanderings,  and  finally  his  voyage  in  a  miraculous 
stone  trough  over  the  turbulent  Northern  Sea  to  an 
undiscovered  island.  After  a  detour  of  the  place,  the 
holy  man,  somewhat  advanced  in  age  and  understanding, 
comes  upon  a  circle  of  penguins.  Mistaking  them  for 
a  primitive  heathen  people,  Saint  Mael  explains  to  them 
successively  Adoption,  Rebirth,  Regeneration,  and  Illu- 
mination, and  then  in  three  days  and  three  nights  bap- 
tizes them  all.  "  When  the  baptism  of  the  penguins  was 
known  in  Heaven,"  proceeds  the  historian  with  the  suave 
gravity  which  heightens  the  effect  of  his  daring,  "  it 
caused  there  neither  joy  nor  sorrow,  but  extreme  sur- 
prise. The  Lord  himself  was  embarrassed.  He  called 
an  assembly  of  scholars  and  theologians  and  asked  them 
if  they  considered  the  baptism  valid."  As  a  result  of  a 
long,  hot  debate,  participated  in  by  St.  Patrick  and 
Saint  Catherine,  Saint  Augustine  and  Saint  Antony, 
Tertullian,  Orosius,  and  Saint  Gregory  of  Nazianzen, 
with  interposed  questions  and  objections  by  the  Lord,  it 
was  decided  that  the  penguins  must  be  changed  into  men. 
And  it  was  done. 

Thus  does  M.  France  admit  the  supernatural,  when 
it  appears !  Since  Lucian  set  the  infernal  gods  to  quar- 
reling over  the  ferry  hire  in  Hades,  dramatized  the  loves 
of  the  Olympians,  and  represented  Zeus,  when  Timon 
began  to  rail,  as  inquiring  casually  of  Hermes  what 
dirty  fellow  was  bawling  from  Attica  beside  Hymettus, 


SKEPTICISM  OF  ANATOLE  FRANCE     183 

no  one,  perhaps,  has  dealt  so  unabashedly  with  the  reign- 
ing dynasty  of  the  Heavenly  Ones.  A  late  unpersecuted 
Voltaire — tolerance  has  made  a  long  march  since  the 
eighteenth  century — he  would  gently  laugh  Jehovah  out 
of  Paradise.  Rien  n*est  plus  Idche,  says  Pascal,  que  ds 
faire  le  brave  contre  Dieu.  True,  one  can  fancy  Anatole 
France  replying,  but  see:  The  walls  of  chrysoprase,  the 
solemn  temples  of  the  twelve-gated  city  are  fast  dis- 
solving like  an  insubstantial  pageant  of  the  air.  Is  it 
not  better  to  smile  than  to  weep? 

With  similar  fidelity  to  the  instructions  of  his  ad- 
viser against  disparaging  sacred  institutions,  M.  France 
describes  the  origins  of  "  property,  nobility,  and  gend- 
armery."  Shortly  after  the  baptism  and  transforma- 
tion of  the  penguins,  they  begin  to  clothe  themselves, 
inclose  land,  and  fight.  One  brains  his  neighbor  with  a 
club ;  another  furious  fellow  fixes  his  teeth  in  the  nose  of 
his  prostrate  adversary;  a  third  brays  the  head  of  a 
woman  under  an  enormous  stone.  Saint  Mael  is  horri- 
fied, but  he  is  assured  by  a  religious  brother  of  wider 
experience  that  the  penguins  are  accomplishing  the  most 
august  of  functions — "  they  are  creating  law ;  they  are 
founding  property ;  they  are  establishing  the  principles 
of  civilization."  All  this  reminds  one  of  the  Social  Con- 
tract and  the  famous  Discourses  of  Rousseau,  but  it  is 
to  be  remembered  that  in  the  state  of  nature  the  pen- 
guins are  feathered  bipeds.  No  golden  age  glimmers 
for  Anatole  France  behind  the  age  of  blood.  Indeed, 
in  Jerome  Coignard  he  has  subjected  the  revolutionary 
illusions  to  the  most  penetrating  criticism :  "  If  one  is 
going  to  take  a  hand  in  governing  men,"  he  declares, 


184     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

"  one  must  not  forget  that  they  are  bad  monkeys."  The 
history  of  the  penguin  nation  is  the  history  of  half-in- 
telligent beasts — the  history  of  Yahoos  and  Hou- 
yhnhnms.  At  this  point,  I  cannot  forbear  quoting  the 
brief,  mordant  sketch  of  "  Draco  the  Great,"  a  hero  of 
the  Middle  Ages : 

He  carried  fire  indifferently  over  the  territory  of  the 
enemy  and  his  own  domain.  And  he  was  wont  to  say,  to 
explain  his  conduct:  "  War  without  burning  is  like  tripe 
without  mustard;  it  is  insipid."  His  justice  was  rigorous. 
When  the  peasants  whom  he  had  taken  prisoners  could  not 
pay  their  ransom,  he  had  them  hanged  on  a  tree,  and  if  any 
unfortunate  woman  came  to  beg  mercy  on  her  penniless 
husband,  he  dragged  her  by  the  hair  at  the  tail  of  his  horse. 
He  lived  like  a  soldier,  free  from  all  effeminacy  (II  vecut  en 
sold  at,  sans  mollesse).  It  is  a  pleasure  to  acknowledge  that 
his  morals  were  pure. 

Something  in  that  reminds  one  at  the  same  time  of 
Swift  and  of  Tacitus.  If  the  style  is  indeed  the  man 
himself,  there  is  a  tincture  of  iron  in  the  blood  of  this 
Epicure. 

There  is  much  piquancy  in  the  contemptuous  account 
of  Les  Temps  Modernes,  but  one  feels  the  author's 
point  most  sharply  in  the  exultant  pessimism  of  his 
vision  of  the  future.  The  notion  that  there  is  a  grim 
limit  set  to  the  evolution  of  life  on  our  planet  has  long 
been  dear  to  the  heart  of  M.  France.  Long  ago  he 
prophetically  buried  the  last  desperate  relic  of  our  race 
in  the  frozen  rind  of  the  sunless  world.  But  here  he 
has  worked  out  more  fully  the  stages  by  which  the 
human  tragedy  is  to  decline  to  the  ultimate  catastrophe. 


SKEPTICISM  OF  ANATOLE  FRANCE      185 

Before  the  somewhat  remote  Last  Day  there  are  to  be 
a  number  of  false  or  temporary  endings  precipitated  by 
forces  at  work  within  the  social  organism.  M.  France 
seems  now  to  have  turned  his  back  upon  the  socialistic 
hope  which  he  courted  a  few  years  ago.  To  the  central- 
izing tendency  of  wealth  no  effective  check  can  be  im- 
posed ;  in  the  long  run,  it  is  as  irresistible  as  gravitation, 
the  rising  of  sap  in  forests,  the  swing  of  planets  in  their 
orbits.  But  at  certain  periods  when  the  remorseless 
oppression  of  capitalists  brings  the  lower  orders  to  the 
verge  of  extinction,  they  will  gain  for  themselves  a 
dreary  breathing  space  with  dynamite.  They  will  level 
all  populous  cities  to  the  dust  and  incinerate  the  pain- 
fully acquired  material  and  intellectual  riches  of  civil- 
ization. For  a  little  while  the  exhausted  survivors  will 
rest,  and  gasping  in  dismal  anarchy  recover  their  animal 
strength.  Then  the  old  blind  urge  of  life  will  begin 
anew;  step  by  step  poor  posterity  will  fight  its  way  up 
the  long  ascent  again ;  once  more  the  many-storied  cities 
will  hum,  and  lean  anaemic  millionaires,  Pharoahs  half- 
mummified,  lord  it  over  the  Egyptian  millions  laying  the 
bricks  for  their  mausoleums.  And  so  the  old  wheel  of 
life  will  turn  round  and  round  in  concentric  circles,  ever 
shortening  its  diameter,  till,  at  last  it  vanishes  in  a 
point,  and  the  barren  globe  freed  of  its  feverish  animal- 
cules journeys  on  through  the  void! 

"  It  is  the  duty  of  every  thinker  who  has  formed  an 
idea  of  the  world,"  said  M.  France  in  one  of  his  essays 
on  contemporary  literature,  "  to  express  that  idea, 
whatever  it  may  be."  If  the  last  chapters  of  L'lle  des 
Pingouins  were  a  faithful  transcript  of  his  sense  of  the 


186     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

facts  of  life  crowding  in  upon  the  sensitive  conscious- 
ness, we  should  have  deeply  to  commiserate  the  author. 
But  the  pessimism  of  M.  France  is  partly  polemical. 
"  The  spiritualist,"  Emerson  tells  us,  "  finds  himself 
driven  to  express  his  faith  in  a  series  of  skepticisms." 
M.  France  began  life  as  a  devout  humanist,  forming  his 
taste  and  his  style  on  the  noblest  literature  of  Greece 
and  Rome.  In  early  manhood,  however,  he  felt  power- 
fully the  new  hope  and  enthusiasm  of  the  early  followers 
of  Darwin.  To  the  young  men  of  his  generation,  it  was 
a  fresh,  firmly-founded  revolutionary  gospel.  But  as  the 
century  wore  on,  the  scientific  millennium  receded  into 
the  infinitely  remote  future.  To  believe  in  it  demanded 
as  pure  an  exercise  of  faith  as  to  believe  in  the  New 
Jerusalem.  M.  France's  faith  was  unequal  to  the  task. 
What  faith  remained  in  him  reverted  to  his  early  human- 
ism. Meantime  the  unreflecting  mass  of  humanity  had 
caught  the  fanatic  fervor  of  the  scientific  dream,  and 
had  left  humanism  far  in  the  rear.  When  M.  France 
returned  to  the  temples  of  his  gods  he  found  them  empty 
of  worshipers.  And  so,  like  most  humanists  to-day,  he 
is  a  disheartened  humanist.  He  would,  perhaps,  have 
spoken  seriously  of  his  faith  if  he  could  have  found 
serious  listeners.  It  is  rather  dreary  to  praise  Pallas 
Athene  in  perfect  solitude.  It  is  more  diverting  to  steal 
into  the  camp  of  the  victors,  and  mock  their  cause  and 
insinuate  horrible  doubt  into  every  heart.  Yet  by  a 
happy  law  of  the  universe  only  the  potential  philanthro- 
pist can  be  misanthropic.  The  Olympian  detachment 
of  M.  France  is  illusory.  Without  a  place  to  stand  on, 
a  man  can  no  more  despise  his  fellows  than  Archimedes 


SKEPTICISM  OF  ANATOLE  FRANCE     187 

could  lift  the  world.  So  long  as  M.  France  despises  us, 
we  need  not  despair ;  the  earth  beneath  his  scornful  feet 
is  a  part  of  the  common  heritage. 

I  find  a  still  more  serious  flaw  in  the  would-be  seamless 
garment  of  M.  France's  skepticism.  He  has  often 
assured  us  that  the  skeptic  is  a  good  citizen,  because, 
uncertain  of  all  things,  he  is  the  least  radical  of  men. 
But  the  salt  of  the  right  skeptic  is  the  love  of  truth. 
Whatever  enters  his  head  he  reports  freely,  as  one  hold- 
ing a  commission  to  act  as  the  disinterested  intelligence 
of  mankind,  surveying  the  past  and  present  and  spying 
out  the  future.  That  salt  was  in  the  virile  fiber  of 
Montaigne  sitting  in  his  tower  in  Perigord,  cupboarding 
the  choice  viands  of  the  ancients  and  portraying  with 
unflinching  hand  the  manners  and  mind  of  the  man  he 
knew  best.  But  Anatole  France — does  he  candidly 
attempt  to  represent  the  world  as  it  appears  ?  Does  he 
love  the  truth  and  search  for  the  truth  above  all  else? 
As  it  seems  to  me  he  loves  above  all  else  the  luxury  of 
philosophic  despair.  He  is  a  kind  of  refined,  philosophi- 
cal sentimentalist.  With  the  assiduity  of  the  Graveyard 
Poets,  he  cultivates  and  cherishes  those  truths,  or  seem- 
ing truths,  which  make  for  melancholy.  We  hear  every 
day:  This  is  the  truth;  we  must  face  it.  The  fact  is 
we  may  usually  turn  our  backs  upon  it,  and  it  is  often  the 
part  of  wisdom  to  do  so.  There  may  be  a  more  whole- 
some truth  at  the  opposite  point  of  the  compass.  It  is 
true  that  when  a  good  man  dies  he  rots  like  a  rascal.  It 
is  also  true  that  he  lives  a  fragrant  life  in  the  memory 
of  his  friends.  To  embrace  the  latter  truth  strengthens 
the  heart;  but  a  certain  kind  of  sentimentalist  always 


188     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

embraces  the  worm  that  inherits  the  shroud.  It  is  the 
truth ;  we  must  face  it.  But  no  man  can  face  all  truth. 
We  judge  a  man's  wisdom  by  his  power  of  making  inti- 
mates of  those  truths  which  give  channel  and  speed  to 
the  languid,  diffusive  drift  of  his  days.  M.  France  has 
sought  through  all  the  world  for  the  truths  inducing  in 
the  perceiver  a  pensive  and  helpless  sadness.  M.  France 
is  too  much  concerned  about  the  misery  of  the  last  man. 
If  the  good  die  young,  as  there  is  some  warrant  for 
believing,  the  last  man  will  deserve  hanging. 

The  skepticism  of  M.  France  is  largely  a  literary 
pose.  It  is  his  justification  for  making  capital  of  un- 
speakable things.  It  is  his  justification  for  unlimited 
intellectual  self-indulgence.  For  a  good  skeptic  he 
knows  altogether  too  much  about  the  future.  When  a 
man's  philosophy  has  carried  him  to  the  point  where 
several  million  years  of  civilization  are  as  to-morrow, 
are  as  nothing,  to  him,  it  is  a  pity  that  it  should  not  go 
a  step  further  to  the  point  where  space  vanishes  and 
time  expires  and  the  illusive  ages  evaporate  into  the 
eternity  of  the  everlasting  Now.  For  a  good  skeptic 
he  is  altogether  too  sure  that  the  world  has  exhausted 
its  possibilities.  He  holds,  indeed,  that  we  live  in  a 
bright-flowing  mist  of  days  and  nights,  of  sleeping  and 
waking  dreams.  But  he  does  not  hold  this  belief  with 
strength  enough  to  be  dumb  and  astonished  at  thought 
of  the  germs  of  new  orders  of  ideas  now  forming  in 
society  or  slumbering  as  yet  unstirred  in  the  unused 
mind  of  the  world.  He  does  not  recognize  as  frankly 
as  a  skeptic  should  how  plastic  is  the  eternal  flux  under 
the  creative  energy  of  the  desire  of  man,  who  had  only 


SKEPTICISM  OF  ANATOLE  FRANCE     189 

to  say,  "  Let  the  flux  be  peopled  with  demons  and  with 
seraphim,"  and  it  was.  Only  the  new-born  babe  enjoys, 
however,  that  purity  of  uncertainty  to  which  M.  France 
pretends.  And  as  soon  as  the  babe  first  sniffs  the  vital 
air,  it  is  a  judge  as  well  as  an  observer.  It  discovers  at 
once  that  for  the  present  at  least  some  things  are  good 
and  beautiful,  and  others  terrible  and  necessary. 


VII 
THE  EXOTICISM  OF  JOHN  SYNGE 

JOHN  SYNGE  was  dead  before  he  was  celebrated,  and 
even  his  posthumous  fame  was  curiously  impersonal.  If 
you  asked  any  man  that  you  met  what  he  thought  of 
the  Playboy  of  the  Western  World,  the  chances  were  in 
favor  of  an  interested  response  on  the  freshness  of  the 
Irish  actors,  the  stupidity  of  the  noisy  objectors  in  the 
audience,  or  the  hilarious  and  unexpected  beauty  of  the 
piece.  But  if  in  your  encounter  with  the  ordinary  play- 
goer you  led  out  with  the  question,  "  What  do  you  think 
of  John  Synge  ?  ",  the  chances  were  even  that  you  would 
be  met  with  the  query,  "  Who  is  he  ?  "  Even  to  many 
who  have  written  about  his  plays,  his  personality  seems 
to  be  as  indistinct  as  that  of  the  author  of  The  Book  of 
the  Dun  Cow;  and  the  inferences  which  they  have  drawn 
from  his  words  recall  Mr.  Archer's  preconception  of  the 
invalid  Stevenson  as  a  happy  athlete.  From  a  half- 
dozen  reviews,  English  and  American,  one  gathers  the 
impression  that  The  Playboy  is  an  "  intensely  national 
Irish  play,"  that  the  author  is  notable  for  "  freshness 
of  outlook  and  spontaneity  of  expression,"  "  depth  of 
ardent  sympathy  "  and  "  tender  charity,"  that  he  has 
u  experienced  the  rich  joy  found  only  in  what  is  superb 
and  wild  in  reality,"  and,  finally,  that  in  his  presence 
"  somehow  criticism  becomes  meaningless ;  it  is  enough 

190 


THE  EXOTICISM  OF  JOHN  SYNGE     191 

to  share  his  vision  and  his  joy."  All  these  phrases 
indicate  what  some  one  has  called  a  positive  genius  for 
hitting  the  wrong  nail  on  the  head.  All  this  reminds 
one  of  what  the  curate  in  the  Aran  Islands  said  to  Synge 
on  finding  him  one  Sunday  morning  loafing  outside  his 
cottage  door.  "  Tell  me,"  inquired  the  curate,  "  did 
you  read  your  Bible  this  morning?  "  Synge  replied  in 
the  negative.  "  Well,  begob,  Mr.  Synge,"  said  the 
good  man,  "  if  you  ever  go  to  heaven,  you'll  have  a  good 
laugh  at  us." 

This  misconception  of  the  man  is  closely  related  to 
the  still  persistent  misconception  of  the  literary  move- 
ment with  which  he  was  associated.  Apparently  the 
"  vulgar  error "  will  not  down,  which  holds  that  the 
so-called  Irish  Renaissance  is  essentially  a  folk  move- 
ment— that  the  new  literature  is  a  spontaneous  burgeon- 
ing of  the  ancient  and  wellnigh  extinct  Celtic  crabtree, 
stirred  at  his  roots  by  Mr.  Douglas  Hyde  and  a  genera- 
tion of  peasant  children  reading  popular  poetry  in  the 
original  Gaelic.  The  more  deeply  one  looks  into  the 
matter  the  more  firmly  one  is  convinced  that  the  his- 
torical, Catholic,  England-hating  Ireland,  which  finds 
voice  in  a  number  of  the  lesser  playwrights  of  the  Dublin 
group,  is  producing  little  of  consequence  to  the  outside 
world.  Wherever  new  blossoms  have  appeared  and  fruit 
has  prospered  there  have  been  cross-fertilization  and  the 
skilful  grafting  of  exotics  in  the  hands  of  a  little  band 
of  learned  experimenters  held  together  by  the  fine  tact 
of  Lady  Gregory  and  the  unflagging  enthusiasm  of  Mr. 
W.  B.  Yeats.  The  informing  spirit  and  quickening 
power  have  drifted  in  on  all  the  winds  of  heaven — from 


England,  Norway,  Germany,  Russia,  and  France,  and 
there  have  been  innumerable  insets  from  the  plantations 
of  Blake  and  Ibsen  and  Hauptmann  and  Tolstoy  and 
Maeterlinck.  As  any  disciple  of  D'Arbois  de  Jubainville 
or  of  Kuno  Meyer  will  tell  you  with  some  disdain,  the 
animating  spirit  of  this  new  poetry  that  walks  the  world 
is  not  the  spirit  of  the  ancient  Irish  bards.  As  any 
intelligent  observer  should  be  able  to  perceive,  it  is  the 
spirit  of  an  entirely  contemporary,  an  entirely  modern 
romanticism,  which  happens,  to  borrow  Mr.  George 
Moore's  word,  to  have  "  enwombed  itself  "  in  Ireland, 
but  which  might  with  almost  equal  facility  enwomb  itself 
in  China  or  Persia;  just  as  the  eighteenth  century  mel- 
ancholy and  unrest  which  enwombed  itself  in  Macpher- 
son's  Ossian  later  reappeared  in  the  Werther  of  Goethe 
and  the  Rene  of  Chateaubriand. 

Now  though  the  relation  of  men  like  Mr.  Yeats  and 
Mr.  Moore  to  general  European  romanticism  and  natur- 
alism is  for  the  most  part  obvious  and  unconcealed, 
Synge  seems  at  first  glance  to  stand  apart  from  them 
and  from  every  one  else.  For  special  reasons  those 
who  knew  him  best  have  not  been  unwilling  to  maintain 
him  in  his  isolation.  He  was  the  man  that  Mr.  Yeats 
had  prophesied  in  the  beginning,  the  proof  of  all  his 
theories,  the  realization  of  his  dreams — the  indigenous 
Irish  poet  inspired  by  close  contact  with  the  ancient 
peasantry  to  utter  the  deep  passion  of  the  people  in 
the  strong  fresh  speech  of  the  folk.  He  was  like  the 
author  of  the  Cuchulin  story ;  he  was  like  Homer.  For, 
as  Mr.  Yeats  said,  the  idea  of  the  Irish  Renaissance  is : 
"  the  epic  interpreted  through  the  peasant,  the  peasant 


THE  EXOTICISM  OF  JOHN  SYNGE     193 

interpreted  through  the  epic."  He  cared  nothing  for 
recent  books ;  he  had  no  relation  to  the  decadent  writers 
of  France ;  "  if  he  was  influenced  by  the  French  writers, 
they  were  of  the  pre-Moliere  period  " : — thus  Mr.  Yeats. 
And  Mr.  Moore  tells  us  with  his  customary  malice  that 
when  Yeats  first  heard  In  the  Shadow  of  the  Glen,  he 
cried,  "  Euripides ! " ;  and  when  he  heard  the  Riders  to 
the  Sea,  he  cried,  "  Aeschylus !  "  Very  similar  to  Mr. 
Yeats's  was  the  critical  feeling  of  the  young  Werther 
when  he  carried  in  one  pocket  the  songs  of  the  divine  Ho- 
mer and  in  the  other  the  songs  of  the  divine  Macpher- 
son — equally  divine  and,  in  the  fall  of  the  year,  far  more 
sympathetic.  Voltaire  malignantly  pointed  out  that 
these  ancient  Celtic  lays  contained  certain  plagiarisms 
from  Solomon  and  Milton,  and  unfortunately  those  who 
have  insisted  on  the  French  antecedents  of  Synge  have 
not  always  been  free  from  a  malicious  desire  to  damage 
his  reputation  as  a  poet  and  especially  as  a  representa- 
tive of  Ireland.  In  consequence  of  various  non-literary 
forces  there  has  been  rather  a  partisan  than  a  critical 
division  of  opinion.  On  the  one  hand,  we  are  told  that 
he  owes  everything  to  the  French  decadents;  on  the 
other,  that  his  work  came  straight  from  the  heart  of 
Erin.  On  the  one  hand  it  is  argued  that  he  was  only  a 
clever  craftsman;  on  the  other,  that  he  stands  by  his 
absolute  achievement  only  a  little  lower  than  Shake- 
speare. While  these  parties  are  reconciling  their  differ- 
ences, it  may  be  worth  while  to  inquire  in  an  entirely 
dispassionate  way,  with  Synge's  collected  works  before 
us,  what  manner  of  man  he  was. 

There  are  before  me  five  portraits  of  Synge,  each  one 


194     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

of  which  suggests  under  scrutiny  one  aspect  of  his  some- 
what elusive  character.  One,  a  grotesque  sketch  by 
Mr.  J.  B.  Yeats,  shows  us  a  hatted  figure  with  back 
turned  and  shoulders  hunched.  If  you  look  closely,  you 
•will  see  that  it  is  "  Synge  at  rehearsal."  But  if  you 
trust  your  first  impression,  you  will  say  that  it  is  a 
dilapidated  tramp  gazing  at  the  stars.  A  second  por- 
trait in  the  collective  edition  has  a  strikingly  elvish  or 
faunish  look — half  timidity  a&d  half  mischief.  A  third 
presents  the  likeness  of  the  literary  Bohemian — mous- 
tache, chin-tuft,  and  general  effect  call  up  a  favorite 
pose  of  R.  L.  Stevenson.  The  fourth,  a  set  piece  in 
profile  against  a  curtain,  faintly  reminds  one  of  a  similar 
study  of  Walter  Pater  with  eyes  fixed  in  aesthetic  con- 
templation. The  impressive  features  of  the  physiog- 
nomy exhibited  in  Mr.  Howe's  book  are  the  brooding 
impenetrable  eyes — eyes  filled  with  dreams  and  shad- 
owed with  pain  and  sadness.  Now  what  we  know  of 
Synge's  life  makes  it  not  wholly  fanciful  to  read  in  these 
faces  a  brief  abstract  of  his  personality  with  his  vagrant 
yearnings,  his  homeless  laughter,  his  facility  in  disguises, 
his  love  of  the  picturesque  and  strange,  and  his  deep- 
seated  melancholy  and  despair. 

If  a  tramp  be  defined  as  a  man  with  an  obscure  past, 
without  home  or  family  or  visible  means  of  support, 
drifting  unaccountably  from  place  to  place,  Synge  was 
for  a  considerable  period  of  his  life — and  that  the  forma- 
tive period — a  tramp.  We  know  that  he  was  born  at 
Rathfarnham,  near  Dublin,  in  1871,  and  that  he  passed 
through  Trinity  College.  Then  the  door  is  almost 
closed  upon  his  occupations  till  1898—9,  when  he  was 


THE  EXOTICISM  OF  JOHN  SYNGE     195 

called  from  abroad  to  take  part  in  the  new  movement  in 
Ireland.  Yet  we  are  permitted  to  catch  one  significant 
glimpse  of  a  poverty-stricken,  silent,  rather  morose 
young  man  in  ill  health,  who  has  left  his  native  land  and 
is  apparently  seeking  to  escape  from  his  memories  in 
aimless  wanderings  among  alien  people  and  alien  modes 
of  thought.  His  first  wayfaring  was  in  Germany,  where 
Heine  was  perhaps  the  will-o'-the-wisp  to  his  feet;  but 
all  roads  lead  the  literary  vagabond  ultimately  to  Paris, 
and  when  he  had  made  his  pilgrimages,  he  brought  up 
in  the  Latin  Quarter.  '  Before  I  met  him,'  says  Mr. 
Yeats, '  he  had  wandered  over  much  of  Europe,  listening 
to  stories  in  the  Black  Forest,  making  friends  with 
servants  and  with  poor  people,  and  this  from  no  aes- 
thetic interest,  for  he  had  gathered  no  statistics,  had 
no  money  to  give,  and  cared  nothing  for  the  wrongs  of 
the  poor,  being  content  to  pay  for  the  pleasure  of  eye 
and  ear  with  a  tune  upon  the  fiddle.' 

Synge's  transformation  from  a  tramp  into  an  Irish- 
man of  letters  his  sponsors  represent  to  us  as  a  kind  of 
modern  miracle.  But  they  can  preserve  this  air  of 
mystery  only  by  insisting  that  the  return  to  Ireland 
meant  an  abrupt  break  and  a  fresh  beginning  rather 
than  the  natural  evolution  of  his  career — only,  in  short, 
by  maintaining  that  what  is  clearly  illuminating  is  wholly 
irrelevant.  Now  about  1895  Synge  installed  himself 
in  solitary  lodgings  in  Paris  and  undertook  to  prepare 
himself  to  be  a  *  critic  of  French  literature  from  the 
French  point  of  view.'  At  this  point  our  authorities 
diverge,  and  Mr.  Yeats  executes  a  bit  of  skilful  and 
characteristic  legerdemain.  He  lifts  the  curtain  in 


196     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

the  garret  of  the  Latin  Quarter  some  four  years  later 
and  discovers  the  author  of  two  or  three  poor  poems 
studying  the  works  of  Racine.  George  Moore,  on  the 
other  hand,  says  explicitly  that  Synge  was  writing 
indifferent  impressionistic  criticisms  of  Lemaitre  and 
Anatole  France.  There  is  no  necessary  conflict  between 
these  two  reports,  but  there  is  a  noticeable  difference  of 
emphasis.  Between  Synge  and  Racine  I  should  never 
attempt  to  establish  any  affinity.  But  between  Anatole 
France  and  Synge  ? — that  is  quite  another  matter.  For 
the  discreet  discoverer  of  the  new  poet  admits  that  he 
found  Synge  '  full  of  that  kind  of  morbidity  that  has 
its  root  in  too  much  brooding  over  methods  of  expres- 
sion, and  ways  of  looking  upon  life  which  come,  not  out 
of  life  but  out  of  literature.'  Was  that  Mr.  Yeats's 
covert  way  of  confessing  that  Synge  was  steeped  in 
Anatole  France?  This,  at  any  rate,  can  be  established: 
Synge's  point  of  view  in  comedy  is  almost  identical 
with  that  of  Anatole  France.  Despite  the  Frenchman's 
vastly  greater  range  of  culture,  the  two  men  are  abso- 
lutely at  one  in  their  aloof,  pyrrhonic  irony  and  their 
homeless  laughter — the  laughter  of  men  who  have  wan- 
dered all  the  highways  of  the  world  and  have  found  no 
abiding  city. 

Mr.  Yeats,  who  is  crammed  with  convictions  and  con- 
stitutionally incapable  of  understanding  this  desperate 
and  smiling  skepticism — no  one,  I  think,  asserts  that 
Synge  acquired  his  humor  from  the  Dublin  singers — Mr. 
Yeats  gives  a  puzzled  account  of  Synge's  ideas  which 
unintentionally  confirms  our  conjecture.  Synge  had,  he 
tells  us,  *  no  obvious  ideal ' ;  he  seemed  '  unfitted  to  think 


THE  EXOTICISM  OF  JOHN  SYNGE     197 

a  political  thought ' ;  he  looked  on  Catholic  and  Prot- 
estant alike  with  amused  indifference;  all  that  comes 
down  to  us  from  education,  and  all  the  earnest  conten- 
tions of  the  day  excited  his  irony ;  *  so  far  as  casual  eye 
could  see,'  he  had  *  little  personal  will.'  This  descrip- 
tion of  moral  and  volitional  prostration  could  be  applied 
with  hardly  an  alteration  to  Anatole  France.  And  it 
should  help  put  to  rest  the  legend  of  the  joyous  Synge, 
bounding  over  the  hills  with  the  glad,  wild  life  of  the 
unspoiled  barbarian.  The  creators  of  the  legend  of  the 
joyous  Synge  have  made  much  of  one  or  two  pages  in  his 
island  notebook  which  reveal  high  nervous  excitement 
induced  by  wild  storms.  I  am  impressed  by  the  equally 
frequent  and  important  symptoms  of  weariness  and  low 
vitality.  His  attitude  toward  death  is  too  friendly.  He 
cannot  make  a  dangerous  passage  over  rough  seas  with- 
out hinting  at  his  readiness  to  sink  out  of  sight  beneath 
the  gray  waters.  He  undergoes  a  surgical  operation  and 
describes  his  sensations  in  a  gruesome  little  narrative 
called  Under  Ether.  While  his  nurses  suppose  him  to 
be  making  ready  for  the  ordeal,  he  slips  quietly  down 
into  the  operating  room  and  examines  the  instruments. 
The  consternation  of  the  attendants  when  they  come 
upon  him  there  alone  is  as  if  they  had  discovered  a  con- 
demned man  on  the  morning  of  his  execution  secretly 
fingering  the  ax.  In  the  grim  humor  of  this  recital  there 
is  something  more  than  manly  resolution  in  the  face  of 
death. 

Synge's  verse  is  what  we  should  expect  of  a  rather 
despondent  young  Bohemian,  unsure  of  himself,  and 
seeking  among  other  poets  food  and  forms  for  his  mel- 


198     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

ancholy.  I  wish  to  tarry  for  a  moment  upon  his  small 
collection  of  poems  and  translations,  partly  because, 
though  little  known,  it  is  intrinsically  interesting,  and 
partly  because  it  reveals  so  clearly  on  a  small  scale  the 
nature  of  his  literary  talent.  The  poems  are  due  to  the 
influence  of  various  masters — to  Burns,  Wordsworth, 
Swinburne,  and  notably,  to  that  fascinating  outlaw, 
Maistre  Fra^ois  Villon.  In  about  one-third  of  them  he 
sings  of  death,  and  in  nearly  all  of  them  there  is  a  dis- 
tinguishable echo  of  some  earlier  singer. 

In  "  Queene,"  for  example,  one  hears  an  echo  of 
Villon's  "  Ballade  of  Dead  Ladies  ": 

Seven  dog-days  we  let  pass 
Naming  queens  in  Glenmacnass, 
All  the  rare  and  royal  names 
Wormy  sheepskin  yet  retains: 
Etain,  Helen,  Maeve,  and  Fand, 
Golden  Deirdre's  tender  hand. 

These  are  rotten,  so  you're  the  Queen 
Of  all  are  living,  or  have  been 

In  the  poem,  "  To  the  Oaks  of  Glencree,"  again,  we 
notice  how  Maistre  Villon  helps  him  shape  and  round 
out  the  first  pure  impulse  of  lyric  exultation : 

My  arms  are  round  you,  and  I  lean 

Against  you,  while  the  lark 
Sings  over  us,  and  golden  lights  and  green 

Shadows  are  on  your  bark. 
There'll  come  a  season  when  you'll  stretch 

Black  boards  to  cover  me; 
Then  in  Mount  Jerome  I  will  lie,  poor  wretch, 

With  worms  eternally. 


THE  EXOTICISM  OF  JOHN  SYNGE     199 

The  startling  and  paradoxical  fact  about  this  collec- 
tion is  that  the  original  poems  constantly  remind  us  of 
some  one  else;  the  translations  alone  seem  unmistak- 
ably Synge's.  The  original  poems  have  the  merits  of 
skilful  literary  imitation.  They  might  have  been  writ- 
ten, however,  by  Stevenson  or  Lang  or  by  Mr.  Edmund 
Gosse,  or  by  half  a  dozen  other  cultivators  of  old  French 
verse.  But  neither  Mr.  Gosse  nor  Lang  nor  Stevenson 
could  have  written  a  line  of  the  poem  that  follows : 

Are  you  bearing  in  mind  that  time  when  there  was  a  fine 
look  out  of  your  eyes,  and  yourself,  pleased  and  thoughtful, 
were  going  up  the  boundaries  that  are  set  to  childhood? 
That  time  the  quiet  rooms,  and  the  lanes  about  the  house, 
would  be  noisy  with  your  songs  that  were  never  tired  out; 
the  time  you'd  be  sitting  down  with  some  work  that  is  right 
for  women,  and  well  pleased  with  the  hazy  coming  times 
you  were  looking  out  at  in  your  own  mind. 

May  was  sweet  that  year,  and  it  was  pleasantly  you'd 
pass  the  day. 

Then  I'd  leave  my  pleasant  studies,  and  the  paper  I  had 
smudged  with  ink  where  I  would  be  spending  the  better 
part  of  the  day,  and  cock  my  ears  from  the  sill  of  my  father's 
house,  till  I'd  hear  the  sound  of  your  voice,  or  of  your  loom 
when  your  hands  moved  quickly.  It's  then  I  would  set  store 
of  the  quiet  sky  and  the  lanes  and  little  places,  and  the  sea 
was  far  away  in  one  place  and  the  high  hills  in  another. 

There  is  no  tongue  will  tell  till  the  judgment  what  I  feel 
in  myself  those  times. 

Here  are  all  the  peculiar  marks  of  Synge  himself — 
the  irresistibly  quaint  idiom,  the  drifting  rhythm,  the 
loose  sentence  structure,  thought  thrown  out  after 
thought,  as  it  were,  without  premeditation,  and  bios- 


200     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

soming  from  phrase  to  phrase,  the  window  opened  upon 
a  mist  of  vague  and  limitless  emotion,  the  poignant  and 
adorable  Celtic  wistfulness ;  while,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
these  lines  are  a  tolerably  close  translation  of  Leopardi's 
"  Silva."  We  are  here  in  the  presence  of  a  pure  miracle 
of  that  style  which  is  Synge's  special  creation,  and 
which  distinguishes  him  not  merely  from  Leopardi,  but 
also  from  all  his  Anglo-Irish  contemporaries.  With  all 
its  apparent  spontaneity,  his  style  is  as  patiently  and 
cunningly  wrought  out  as  the  style  of  Walter  Pater — 
wrought  of  a  scrupulously  select  vocabulary,  idiom,  and 
images,  with  an  exacting  ear  controlling  the  cadence 
and  shepherding  the  roving  and  dreamy  phrases.  With 
the  aid  of  this  perfected  instrument  he  is  able  to  appro- 
priate and  seal  as  his  own  poems  from  authors  as  diverse 
as  Petrarch  and  Walter  von  der  Vogelweide,  Leopardi 
and  Villon.  This  fact,  taken  together  with  his  depend- 
ence in  the  original  poems,  tends  to  justify  a  search 
beneath  the  surface  of  his  other  work  for  alien  forces 
secretly  shaping  his  emotions  and  determining  his 
forms. 

The  orthodox  method  of  "  explaining  "  Synge  is  to 
ignore  the  poems  and  translations  and  point  to  the 
volume  on  the  Aran  Islands.  This  is  the  record,  we  are 
told,  of  Synge's  literary  salvation;  here  lies  the  key  to 
the  dramas.  In  other  words,  we  are  asked  to  believe 
that  Mr.  Yeats's  theory  of  poetry  has  been  demon- 
strated. A  stranded  Irishman  living  gloomily  in  Paris 
without  ideal  and  almost  without  ideas  is  sent  to  a  little 
group  of  lonely  islands  to  the  southwest  of  Galway, 
inhabited  by  stolid  fisher-folk  in  a  very  backward  state 


THE  EXOTICISM  OF  JOHN  SYNGE     201 

of  culture.  He  spends  part  of  every  year  there — we 
pass  over  the  fact  that  the  other  part  is  spent  in  Paris — 
wearing  the  rawhide  shoes  of  the  natives,  warming  his 
blood  with  their  fires  and  their  poteen,  living  in  their 
kitchens,  hearing  their  legends,  and  sharing  in  their 
noble  primitive  customs  till  the  folk  passion  streams 
through  him  and  makes  him  a  genius.  If  any  one  is 
skeptical,  we  point  to  the  fact  that  something  like  the 
"  germ  "  of  two  or  three  of  Synge's  plays  is  actually 
present  here  in  the  form  of  jottings  on  folk  story  and 
belief.  Now,  this  is  a  delightfully  simple  recipe  for 
making  a  genius.  If  this  were  the  whole  truth,  one 
might  agree  without  reservation  with  one  of  the  review- 
ers who  declares  that  the  Aran  Islands  is  of  "  vast 
importance  as  throwing  light  on  this  curious  develop- 
ment," and  who  adds  that  it  "  is  like  no  other  book  we 
have  ever  read." 

When  I  first  read  the  A  ran  Islands,  I  thought  of  that 
much-experienced  vagabond  and  subtle  exploiter  of 
exotic  and  primitive  cultures,  Pierre  Loti ;  and  I  have 
learned  recently  with  some  satisfaction  from  a  foot- 
note in  Mr.  Howe's  book,  that  Synge  thought  Pierre 
Loti  "  the  best  living  writer  of  prose."  And  when  I 
found  Synge  comparing  conditions  in  the  Aran  Islands 
to  a  disadvantage  with  what  he  had  seen  in  his  rambles 
in  Brittany,  I  thought  of  Anatole  le  Braz  and  all  his 
charming  studies  of  the  songs  and  superstitions  and  cus- 
toms and  characters  of  that  other  Celtic  people.  And 
then  there  drifted  into  my  remembrance  the  pensive  face 
of  another  wanderer  and  exile,  half-Irish  and  half-Greek, 
known  in  the  Orient  as  Koizumi  Yakumo,  and  in  the 


202     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

western  world  as  Lafcadio  Hearn.  As  I  turned  once 
more  the  pages  of  his  book  on  Japan  and  ran  through 
the  Life  and  Letters,  glancing  at  his  Eastern  costume 
and  at  the  almond  eyes  of  his  sons,  I  reflected  that  he, 
at  any  rate,  had  possessed  the  courage  to  realize  the 
dreams  of  his  favorite  author,  Theophile  Gautier,  and 
the  Oriental  reveries  of  Victor  Hugo.  Finally  I  opened 
the  book  of  Chateaubriand,  great  father  of  them  all,  and 
read :  *  When  he  arrived  among  the  Natchez,  Rene  had 
been  obliged,  in  order  to  conform  to  the  customs  of  the 
Indians,  to  take  a  wife,  but  he  did  not  live  with  her.  A 
melancholy  disposition  drew  him  to  the  depths  of  the 
forest ;  there  he  passed  whole  days  alone,  and  seemed 
a  savage  among  the  savages.' 

The  attitude,  the  point  of  view — that  is  the  question 
about  this  Irishman  and  his  book  on  the  Aran  Islands. 
Que  diable  allait-il  faire  dans  cette  galere?  Now,  it  is 
an  essential  error  to  imagine  that  when  Synge  passed 
from  the  Latin  Quarter  to  the  Aran  Islands  he  was 
returning  to  his  own  people.  He  never  desired  to  return 
to  his  own  people.  He  went  to  this  group  of  islands, 
and  then  to  the  most  remote  and  backward  of  them, 
because  he  wished  to  escape  into  a  perfectly  strange  and 
virgin  environment. 

The  peculiar  charm  of  the  Aran  Islands  and  other 
books  of  its  class  consists  not  in  the  identification  of 
the  narrator  with  the  life  of  the  people  whom  he  de- 
scribes, but  rather  in  accentuating  the  contrast  between 
the  sophisticated  son  of  the  cities  and  the  simple  bar- 
barian. It  is  the  aesthetic  charm  of  looking  upon  illu- 
sions through  the  eyes  of  the  disillusioned.  In  the 


THE  EXOTICISM  OF  JOHN  SYNGE     203 

earlier  examples  of  this  genre  the  sense  of  the  sundering 
gulf  is  emphasized  by  bringing  the  weary  heir  of  all  the 
ages  into  sentimental  relations  with  a  '  noble '  female 
savage — an  unspoiled  daughter  of  the  wilderness.  But 
the  sentiment  now  smacks  of  the  romanticism  of  the 
old  school.  In  the  various  books  in  which  Pierre  Loti 
pictures  his  exotic  amours,  you  may  trace  the  declension 
of  the  lovely  and  beloved  barbarian  into  a  mere  tran- 
sitory symbol  of  the  *  soul '  of  the  land  in  which  she  is 
found.  In  the  Manage  de  Loti,  for  example,  there  is 
still  a  breath  of  strange  passion  for  the  poor  Poly- 
nesian girl,  yet  the  lover  comments  as  follows :  *  In  truth 
we  were  children  of  two  natures,  widely  sundered  and 
diverse,  and  the  union  of  our  souls  could  only  be  tran- 
sitory, incomplete,  and  troubled.'  But  in  that  most 
heartlessly  beautiful  book  in  contemporary  literature, 
Madame  Chrysantheme,  the  breath  of  passion  has  given 
way  to  sheer  nervous  disgust.  With  the  little  yellow 
poupee,  Loti  has  nothing  in  common,  not  even  an  emo- 
tion. As  he  takes  pains  to  point  out  in  the  dedication 
to  the  Duchesse  de  Richelieu,  though  Madame  Chrysan- 
theme seems  to  have  the  longest  role,  it  is  certain  that 
the  three  principal  personages  are:  Moi,  le  Japon  et 
VEffet  que  ce  pays  m'a  produit,  f  Myself,  Japan  and 
the  Effect  which  that  country  produces  in  me ' — the 
bitter  perfume  which  a  crushed  chrysanthemum  of 
Nagasaki  exhales  for  the  nostrils  of  a  disillusioned 
Academician. 

Essentially  Synge  was  seeking  the  same  thing — the 
perfume  which  the  Aran  Islands  could  yield  to  the  dis- 
illusioned Irish-Parisian.  He,  too,  has  transferred  the 


204     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

sentiment,  which  was  formerly  attached  to  the  fair 
savage,  to  the  land  itself.  Despite  his  apparent  solici- 
tude for  realistic  detail,  it  is  the  subjective  soul  of 
the  islands  that  he  is  striving  to  capture.  His  book, 
like  Loti's,  is  pieced  together  of  short  impressionistic 
sketches  which  are  related  to  one  another  only  through 
the  mood  of  the  author.  '  It  is  only  in  the  intonation 
of  a  few  sentences,'  he  writes,  *  or  some  fragment  of 
melody  that  I  catch  the  real  spirit  of  the  island,  for  in 
general  the  men  sit  together  and  talk  of  the  tides  and 
the  fish,  and  the  price  of  kelp  in  Connemara.'  The  tra- 
ditional lovely  savage  has  here  suffered  a  further  declen- 
sion into  a  peasant  girl  in  her  teens  toward  whom  only 
a  friendly  attachment  exists.  Yet  this  girl,  like  her 
famous  predecessors,  becomes  the  symbol  of  what  he  has 
come  to  seek :  '  At  one  moment  she  is  a  simple  peasant, 
at  another  she  seems  to  be  looking  out  at  the  world 
with  a  sense  of  prehistoric  disillusion  and  to  sum  up 
in  the  expression  of  her  gray-blue  eyes  the  whole  ex- 
ternal despondency  of  the  clouds  and  sea.'  And  after 
he  has  talked  to  her  of  the  '  men  who  live  alone  in  Paris,' 
he  notes  that  '  below  the  sympathy  we  feel  there  is  still 
a  chasm  between  us.'  I  do  not  wish  to  push  this  paral- 
lelism farther  than  it  goes.  In  the  Aran  Islands  the 
Mot,  as  well  as  the  maiden,  is  subdued  almost  beyond 
comparison.  But  both  men,  like  all  the  children  of 
Chateaubriand,  avail  themselves  of  picturesque  exotic 
scenes  to  enlarge  and  reverberate  the  lyric  cry  of  their 
own  weariness  in  civilized  life  and  their  loneliness  out 
of  it. 

Synge's  dramas  are  all  sad,  tragedies  and  comedies 


THE  EXOTICISM  OF  JOHN  SYNGE     205 

alike,  because  they  are  all  based  upon  a  radical  and 
hopeless  disillusion.  In  them  the  native  lyrical  impulse, 
which  in  the  poems  we  found  checked  by  the  cynicism 
of  Villon,  and  which  in  the  Aran  Islands  expanded  under 
the  influence  of  Loti,  is  again  checked  and  controlled  by 
the  irony  of  Anatole  France.  This  is  no  doubt  a  bald 
and  over-emphatic  way  of  putting  the  case,  but  it  may 
serve  to  indicate  the  general  modes  in  which  foreign 
forces  determined  his  talent.  Synge  has  been  praised 
by  many  critics  on  the  ground  that  he  has  reconciled 
poetry  with  life.  In  the  sense  that  he  has  broken 
through  the  old  '  poetic  diction '  and  invented  a  new 
poetic  dialect  with  a  fresh  savor  of  earth  in  it,  this  is 
doubtless  true.  But  in  a  profounder  sense  it  is  nearer 
the  truth  to  say  that  he  has  widened  the  rift  that  was 
between  them.  For  the  drift  of  all  his  work  is  to  empha- 
size the  eternal  hostility  between  a  harsh  and  repug- 
nant world  of  facts  controlled  by  law,  and  the  inviting 
realm  of  lawless  imagination.  In  one  of  the  longest 
of  his  plays,  The  Well  of  the  Saints,  this  idea  becomes 
perfectly  explicit.  Two  blind  beggars  who  have  long 
pleased  themselves  with  thinking  of  each  other's  beauty 
are,  through  a  miracle,  restored  to  sight.  But  the  vision 
of  *  things  as  they  are '  is  so  hideous  that  they  fall  into 
a  violent  hatred  of  each  other.  And  they  are  both  so 
thankful  when  they  go  blind  again  that  they  reject 
with  scorn  the  holy  man's  offer  to  repeat  the  miracle. 
This  is  perhaps  the  most  elaborate  expression  of  an  idea 
in  all  Synge's  works,  and  one  is  not  surprised  to  learn 
that  four  years  before  The  Well  of  the  Saints  there 
was  performed  and  printed  in  Paris  a  *  Chinese '  play 


206     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

by  M.  George  Clemenceau,  called  the  Voile  du  Bonheur, 
which  contains  identically  the  same  idea,  and  which,  as 
Mr.  Howe  concedes,  it  is  '  perfectly  probable '  that 
Synge  knew. 

For  us  The  Well  of  the  Saints  is  significant  only  as 
illustrating  with  especial  clearness  that  profound  sense 
of  disillusion  which  underlies  all  Synge's  eccentric  come- 
dies, and  constitutes,  as  I  have  said,  his  point  of  contact 
with  Anatole  France.  The  most  France-like  comedy 
that  he  ever  conceived  was  never  written,  but  the 
scenario  is  reported  to  us  by  Mr.  Yeats.  *  Two  women, 
a  Protestant  and  a  Catholic,  take  refuge  in  a  cave,  and 
there  quarrel  about  religion,  abusing  the  Pope  or  Henry 
VIII,  but  in  low  voices,  for  the  one  fears  to  be  ravished 
by  the  soldiers,  the  other  by  the  rebels.  At  last  one 
woman  goes  out  because  she  would  sooner  meet  any 
fate  than  such  wicked  company.'  Now  it  is  just  this 
homeless  elfishness  of  his  mirth  that  distinguishes  Synge 
from  Jonson  and  Moliere  and  Congreve,  with  whose 
names  his  has  been  so  fearlessly  coupled.  In  all  the 
classical  comedy  of  the  world  one  is  made  aware  of  the 
seat  whence  the  laughing  spirit  sallies  forth  to  scourge 
the  vices  or  sport  with  the  follies  and  affectations  of 
men.  When  the  play  is  over,  something  has  been  accom- 
plished toward  the  clarification  of  one's  feelings  and 
ideas ;  after  the  comic  catharsis,  illusions  dissolve  and 
give  way  to  a  fresh  vision  of  what  is  true  and  perma- 
nent and  reasonable.  Synge's  comedies  end  in  a  kind  of 
ironical  bewilderment.  His,  indeed,  is  outlaw  comedy 
with  gypsy  laughter  coming  from  somewhere  in  the 
shrubbery  by  the  roadside,  pealing  out  against  church 


THE  EXOTICISM  OF  JOHN  SYNGE     207 

and  state,  and  man  and  wife,  and  all  the  ordinances  of 
civil  life. 

It  is  not  that  many  of  the  dramatis  persona:  are 
vagrants,  but  that  the  dramatist  himself  is  in  secret 
heart  a  vagrant,  and  his  inmost  vision  of  felicity  is 
purposeless  vagabondage.  What  are  the  passages  in 
these  plays  that  all  the  critics  delight  to  quote,  and  that 
the  playgoer  carries  home  from  the  theatre — fragments 
of  them — singing  in  his  memory  ?  They  are  the  passages 
in  which  some  queen  or  beggar,  touched  with  the  lyric 
ecstasy,  expresses  a  longing  to  go  roaming  down  the 
open  road  or  into  the  wilderness.  You  will  find  this 
gypsy  call  in  every  one  of  Synge's  dramas  except  The 
Riders  to  the  Sea.  In  the  Shadow  in  the  Glen  it  is  a 
peasant  housewife  who  loathes  her  little  cottage  and  her 
dry  and  oldish  husband,  and  follows  a  shabby  tramp 
out  into  the  hills  where  "  you'll  be  hearing  the  herons 
crying  out  over  the  black  lakes,  and  you'll  be  hearing 
the  grouse  and  the  owls  with  them,  and  the  larks  and 
the  big  thrushes  when  the  days  are  warm."  In  the 
Well  of  the  Saints  it  is  the  blind  beggars  fleeing  from  the 
light  and  reality  and  preferring  to  sit  in  darkness  and 
illusion  by  the  highway,  "  hearing  a  soft  wind  turning 
round  the  little  leaves  of  the  spring,  and  feeling  the 
sun,  and  we  not  tormenting  our  souls  with  the  sight 
of  the  gray  days,  and  the  holy  men,  and  the  dirty  feet 
is  trampling  the  world."  In  the  Tinker's  Wedding  it  is 
a  trio  of  itinerant  peddlers  who  after  a  brief  skirmish 
with  the  Holy  Church,  gag  the  priest  and  scurry  off 
with  the  gold  originally  intended  as  a  wedding  fee,  "  to 
have  a  good  time  drinking  that  bit  with  the  trampers 


208     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

on  the  green  of  Clash."  In  the  Playboy  it  is  Christy 
Mahon  dreaming  of  the  time  when  he  and  Pegeen  will 
be  "  pacing  Neifin  in  the  dews  of  night,  the  time  sweet 
smells  do  be  rising,  and  you'd  see  a  little  shiny  new 
moon,  maybe,  sinking  on  the  hills."  Even  to  that  piece 
built  of  the  heroic  stuff  of  the  bards,  Deirdre  of  the 
Sorrows,  he  gives  the  same  turn :  here  it  is  a  wondrously 
fair  woman  scorning  a  share  in  sovereignty  and  the  high 
king  of  Ulster  to  go  salmon-spearing  and  vagabonding 
with  the  sons  of  Naisi.  To  this  man  in  whose  vision  of 
joy  we  are  invited  to  participate,  life  presents  itself  in 
its  comic  aspects  as  a  juxtaposition  and  irreconcilable 
opposition  of  hideous  realities  and  hopeless  dreams, 
dreams  like  the  glens  of  Neifin  in  the  dews  of  night, 
realities  like  Old  Mahon  in  the  potato  field — '  He  was  a. 
dirty  man,  God  forgive  him.' 

What,  then,  shall  we  say  of  his  tragedy?  Those  who 
are  sealed  of  the  tribe  of  Synge  speak  high  praise  of 
The  Riders  to  the  Sea,  that  picture  of  the  drear  old 
woman  who  has  lost  all  her  sons.  As  Mr.  Edward 
O'Brien  declares  in  the  preface  printed  in  the  collective 
edition,  this  drama  is  set  in  the  atmosphere  of  universal 
action ;  it  holds  the  "  '  timeless  peace  '  that  passeth  all 
understanding."  This  is  rare  vision,  indeed.  It  is  a 
noble  phrase,  this  '  timeless  peace.'  It  connotes  in  my 
imagination  the  serene  enduring  forever  of  victorious 
heroes  and  saints  who  have  passed  out  of  tribulation. 
It  is  not,  at  any  rate,  an  empty  euphemism  for  annihila- 
tion, but  a  state  in  which  even  those  of  the  living  dwell 
who,  like  the  Stoic  emperor,  have  caught  a  vision  of  a 
central  beauty  and  abiding  harmony  in  all  the  works 


209 

of  God.  It  is  the  mood  in  which  all  high  tragedy  leaves 
us;  the  still  elation  into  which  we  rise  when  blind 
CEdipus  answers  the  call  of  the  god ;  the  *  calm  of  mind, 
all  passion  spent '  with  which  we  are  dismissed  by  that 
superb  last  chorus  in  Samson  Agonistes,  beginning: 

All  is  best,  though  oft  we  doubt 
What  the  unsearchable  dispose 
Of  Highest  Wisdom  brings  about. 

Such,  they  tell  us,  is  the  atmosphere  of  Riders  to  the 
Sea.  It  is  like  Lear,  it  is  like  Greek  tragedy;  it  is  not, 
as  they  hasten  to  say — it  is  not  like  Maeterlinck's  Home 
or  The  Intruder.  Synge  certainly  does  differ  from 
Maeterlinck  in  two  striking  respects.  While  the  Belgian 
'  mystic  '  deprives  his  persons  of  personality  and  local- 
ity and  confers  a  kind  of  demonic  personality  upon 
death,  the  naturalistic  Irishman  steeps  his  lines  in  per- 
sonality and  the  reek  of  the  gray  sky  and  the  smell  of 
the  sea,  and  he  represents  death,  in  spite  of  the  premo- 
nitions of  Maurya,  as  only  the  old  dark  way  of  nature. 
But  so  far  as  what  the  Germans  call  the  '  inner  form  ' 
is  concerned,  Synge  gives  us  simply  an  Irish  transpo- 
sition of  Maeterlinck.  Strictly  speaking,  Riders  to  the 
Sea  is  not  a  tragedy  at  all,  because  it  is  not  a  drama. 
It  might  with  more  propriety  be  called  a  tragic  idyl — a 
somber  picture,  impressive  enough  in  its  kind,  with  the 
fearful  whispering  of  the  young  girls,  whose  necks  have 
not  yet  bowed  beneath  the  ancient  burden,  and  the  gray 
broken  old  mother,  who  looks  before  and  after  and  has 
passed  through  all  illusions,  sitting  there  patiently, 
passively,  receiving  the  tidings  of  disaster.  Protagonist 


210     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

in  the  proper  sense  of  the  word  there  is  none;  no  act 
of  the  will  turning  against  destiny  as  a  token  of  human 
participation  in  that  divine  energy  into  which  death 
resumes  us  all.  It  is  this  turning  of  the  will  that  makes 
just  the  difference  between  what  is  drama  and  what  is 
not ;  and  between  the  mood  with  which  Samson  in  Gaza 
affects  us  when  he  says,  *  And  I  shall  shortly  be  with 
them  that  rest,'  and  the  mood  with  which  Maurya 
affects  us  when  she  says,  '  No  man  at  all  can  be  living 
forever,  and  we  must  be  satisfied.'  It  is  the  difference 
between  Milton  looking  into  the  timeless  peace  and 
Synge  looking  into  the  noisome  grave.  We  heard  him 
before  crying  aloud  under  the  golden  lights  of  the  oaks 
of  Glencree  that  in  the  end  black  boards  would  cover 
him  and  he  should  lie  with  worms  eternally.  Just  that 
is  the  tragic  vision  and  significance  of  The  Riders  to  the 
Sea. 


VIII 

THE  COMPLACENT  TORYISM  OF 
ALFRED  AUSTIN 

IN  a  day  when  ancient  manuscripts  are  opened  and 
made  to  yield  up  misprized  and  forgotten  genuises,  it 
is  singular  that  no  one  seems  to  have  discovered  Mr. 
Alfred  Austin.  Fortune,  who  deals  inscrutably  with 
the  reputation  of  poets,  has  apportioned  him  a  unique 
destiny.  To  some  she  has  given  merit  without  fame ;  to 
others,  fame  without  merit ;  to  him  alone,  fame  without 
being  read.  Both  before  and  after  he  entered  upon  the 
laureateship,  his  works  were  considered  inessential  to 
salvation.  But  upon  his  assumption  of  the  singing 
robes  of  Lord  Tennyson,  he  stepped  at  one  conspicuous 
stride  into  the  hot  sunlight  of  journalistic  derision. 
His  own  long  participation  in  conservative  journalism 
as  leader  writer  for  the  Standard  contributed  to  the 
acrimonious  hilarity  of  his  reception.  Liberal  knives 
hitherto  exercised  against  his  politics  were  now  for  the 
first  time  fleshed  in  his  poetry.  Little  Englanders,  be- 
come for  the  nonce  literary  critics,  collected  all  the  hasty 
and  unfiled  lines  in  the  lays  of  the  "  hysterical  Helot  of 
Imperialism."  The  merciless  cartoonist  elevated  him  to 
the  ancient  throne  of  Dulness  and  twined  the  Parnassian 
laurels  about  his  girdle.  The  wits  of  the  press  under- 
took to  commit  him  with  his  peers,  sagely  debating 

211 


ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

whether  to  lodge  him  by  copious  Southey  or  elegant 
James  Pye,  or  whether  to  bid  Shadwell  lie  a  shade 
nearer  Flecknoe  and  make  room  for  the  newcomer 
by  Colley  Gibber.  His  name  has  thus  become  a  house- 
hold allusion;  his  works — who  has  read  them?  Here 
was  surely  a  porridge  to  have  killed  a  stouter  poet  than 
the  Quarterly's  martyr,, 

Mr.  Austin  is  different;  at  seventy-six,  still  appar- 
ently as  hale,  happy,  and  industrious  as  ever,  he  pub- 
lished his  memoirs  *  in  two  volumes  comprising  some 
six  hundred  pages  written  with  unflagging  zest  and 
genuine  power  in  self-revelation.  Those  familiar  with 
him  only  through  floating  rumor  may  surmise  that  he 
erected  this  memorial  to  anticipate  a  neglectful  and 
prejudiced  posterity — lest,  if  he  set  not  hand  to  the 
task,  there  should  be  a  lacuna  in  the  Lives  of  the  British 
Poets.  All  the  evidence,  however,  indicates  that  Mr. 
Austin  became  his  own  biographer,  as  he  became  his  own 
poet,  on  the  principle  that  if  one  would  have  a  thing 
done  well  one  should  do  it  one's  self;  and  he  has  left 
little  to  the  hands  of  subsequent  biographers  or  critics. 
Certainly  in  this  happy  work  there  is  not  the  slightest 
trace  of  a  head  beneath  the  critical  bludgeonings 
"  bloody  but  unbowed."  There  is  no  trace  of  blood  or 
echo  of  bludgeon.  Throughout  the  book,  which  is  not 
approached  in  interest  by  any  of  the  author's  previous 
writings,  there  is  only  smiling  self-complacency  and  the 
mild  afterglow  of  a  long  and  successful  experience  in — 
to  quote  his  own  summary — "  Literature,  in  verse  and 
prose ;  Politics,  internal  and  international ;  Journalism, 

1The  Autobiography  of  Alfred  Austin,  1835-1910;  New  York. 


TORYISM  OF  AUSTIN  £13 

War,  Law,  Religion,  Art,  Travel,  Society,  Town  and 
Country  Life." 

This  self-complacency  appears  in  the  record  of  his 
influence  with  political  leaders ;  in  the  glimpse  that  he 
offers  us  of  Parliamentary  honors  proffered  him  but 
thrust  aside  for  higher  rewards ;  in  his  words  to  young 
writers  on  the  secrets  of  style;  in  his  hints  for  future 
pilgrims  to  Italian  shrines  consecrated  by  his  verse; 
and,  above  all,  in  the  account — since  Wordsworth's 
Prelude,  unequalled  in  minuteness  and  self-reverence — of 
his  own  poetical  development.  His  early  satirical  poem 
entitled  The  Season  contains,  he  tells  us,  in  spite  of  the 
faults  of  irresponsible  youth,  "  the  germ  of  what  Mat- 
thew Arnold  called  *  the  criticism  of  life  '  to  be  gathered 
from  one's  works  in  their  entirety."  (A  peculiar  sub- 
stitution of  "  one  "  for  "  /  "  is  a  "  note  "  of  Mr.  Austin's 
style.)  From  this  germ,  he  traces  with  retrospective, 
brooding,  and  affectionate  finger  the  movement — ofttimes 
unconscious — of  his  poetical  powers  toward  that  far-off, 
divine  event,  his  masterpiece,  The  Human  Tragedy. 
Pointing  out  that  Italy  cradled,  though  England  bore, 
his  poetry,  he  declares  that  his  Italian  sojournings 
"  stripped  him  "  of  that  insularity  of  familiar  knowl- 
edge that  marks  so  much  of  English  literature.  Recall- 
ing early  days  in  Rome,  he  speaks  with  wonder  of  his 
unawareness  of  the  divine  things  then  a-brewing :  "  I 
little  knew  that  The  Human  Tragedy,  not  to  come  fully 
and  finally  to  the  birth  till  more  than  ten  years  later, 
was  already  germinating,  and  was  waiting  only  for  the 
simultaneous  occurrence  of  the  mighty  European  events 
between  the  years  1866  and  1871  and  the  much-needed 


expansion  of  my  own  mind."  This  sense  of  cosmic  ges- 
tation, then  carried  so  blithely,  but  almost  oppressive 
in  the  retrospect,  reminds  us  of  Eckermann  and  Goethe 
marveling  together  over  the  genesis  of  Faust.  And  sure 
enough,  a  few  lines  later  Mr.  Austin  adds  in  the  benevo- 
lent tone  which  he  adopts  toward  his  period  of  poetic 
adolescence :  "  But,  as  Goethe  said,  *  No  youth  can  be 
a  master,'  and  one  was  young."  As  he  dwells  on  what  he 
now  sees  were  the  high  points  of  his  experience,  the 
phrase  comes  in  like  a  refrain :  "  I  did  not  then  know 
or  suspect " ;  "  without  any  consciousness  that  one's 
poetic  education  was  being  promoted  by  it  " ;  "I  now 
can  retrospectively  see  that  one's  education  and  the 
storing  of  one's  mental,  moral  and  emotional  capacity 
were  going  forward.  Had  I  known  it  at  the  time,  what 
pain  it  would  have  spared  me  (  ?  one)  !  "  This  Little- 
did-I-wot  runs  like  a  silver  thread  throughout  the  auto- 
biography: Mr.  Austin  is  the  most  spontaneous  of 
poets.  His  appreciation  of  his  own  poetry — nowhere 
deficient  in  delicacy — reaches  its  tenderest  expression  in 
his  comment  on  certain  villages  in  northern  Italy  once 
visited  by  him :  "  Suppressing  their  less  attractive  fea- 
tures, imaginative  memory  transfigured  them  later  in 
the  grave,  sad  journey  of  Godfrid  and  Olympia  to  Milan 
from  the  little  chapel  in  Spiaggiscura,  that  closes  with 
the  melancholy  line, 

Ah!  life  is  sad,  and  scarcely  worth  the  pain." 

This  is  indeed  a  melancholy  line,  but  though  it  illus- 
trates Mr.  Austin's  sympathetic  imagination  and  his 


TORYISM  OF  AUSTIN  215 

power  over  the  sententious  poetic  phrase,  it  by  no  means 
represents  his  criticism  of  life.  As  I  have  already 
intimated,  a  divine  satisfaction  with  his  own  position,  a 
bland  unconsciousness  of  contemporary  feeling  and 
opinion — these  are  precisely  the  startling  and  notable 
traits  of  the  Laureate's  character.  They  are  startling 
because  at  first  view  one  cannot  see  what  supports  them. 
They  are  notable  because,  as  one  considers  the  pages  of 
this  autobiography,  one  sees  exactly  what  supports 
them.  One  perceives  that  these  traits  are  not  mere  per- 
sonal idiosyncrasies  but  the  traditional  and  distinguish- 
ing marks  of  a  diminishing  but  dogged  literary,  social, 
and  political  group.  Mr.  Austin,  though  he  wots  it  not, 
is  the  last  minstrel  of  Toryism.  As  he  writes,  he  feels 
himself  soothed,  sustained,  and  magnified  by  the  sup- 
port of  the  landed  gentlemen  of  England.  He  is  not,  he 
fancies,  dipping  his  pen  into  the  shallow  well  of  egotism 
but  into  the  inexhaustible  springs  of  English  sentiment. 
The  genial  and  versatile  figure  that  he  portrays  full 
length  before  us  he  conceives  as  no  mere  longanimous 
minor  poet  but  as  a  typical,  if  somewhat  superior,  gen- 
tleman of  Albion  to  whom  some  celestial  beneficence  has 
accorded,  besides  the  common  excellencies  of  his  class, 
the  sacred  gift  of  song.  He  has  consecrated  the  sacred 
gift  of  song  to  the  celebration  of  the  common  excel- 
lencies of  his  class.  We  can  make  no  sound  valuation  of 
his  poetry  without  some  consideration  of  the  origin  and 
nature  of  his  ideas. 

Like  Sir  Walter  Scott  of  Abbotsford,  who  first  made 
him  conscious  that  he  was  a  poet,  and  like  Lord  Byron 
of  Newstead  Abbey,  whose  verse  and  romantic  pilgrim- 


216     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

age  he  has  imitated  in  The  Human  Tragedy — though 
without  passion,  rebellion,  wit,  or  diablerie — Mr.  Austin 
is  a  great  respecter  of  family.  On  the  basis  of  his  trivial 
mention  of  literary  contemporaries  and  his  ample  en- 
largement upon  his  intimacy  with  baronets  and  lords, 
we  can  easily  credit  his  declaration  that  "  no  one  admires 
honourable  descent  and  the  easy  gradations  of  English 
society,  from  class  to  class,  more  than  I  do."  This 
feeling,  eminently  becoming  in  an  official  singer  to  the 
royal  household,  is  apparent  in  his  treatment  of  his 
own  lineage.  Born  of  Roman  Catholic  parents  in  this 
best  possible  of  worlds  six  years  after  the  Catholic 
Emancipation  Act,  Mr.  Austin  is  derived  from  what 
every  American  would  regard  as  comfortable <  aristo- 
cratic stock,  his  family  for  three  generations  before  him 
having  dealt  in  wool.  And  yet  with  a  peculiarly  Vic- 
torian instinct  for  adorning  whatever  he  touches,  he 
contrives  to  cast  an  additional  glamour  over  his  family- 
tree.  Though  he  does  not  attempt  to  follow  his  physi- 
cal ancestry  beyond  his  great-grandfather,  he  shows  at 
any  rate — with  the  aid  of  Chambers's  Encyclopaedia — 
that  the  "  honourable  trade  of  wool-stapling  "  flourished 
as  early  as  the  time  of  Edward  III ;  and  he  has  himself 
seen  houses  of  "  striking  architectural  beauty  "  which 
belonged  to  wool-staplers  "  in  the  days  of  the  Planta- 
genets." 

Since  he  traces  his  forebears  only  to  satisfy  legiti- 
mate curiosity  as  to  the  antecedents  of  his  literary 
talent,  it  is  no  less  essential  than  interesting  to  exhibit 
the  close  relationship  existing  between  the  manufacture 
of  wool  and  verse ;  so  that  we  may  not  think  it  anomal- 


TORYISM  OF  AUSTIN  217 

ous  but  entirely  natural  to  find  the  same  stock  which 
through  three  generations  put  forth  wool-staplers  in 
the  next  putting  forth  a  poet.  History  is  on  Mr. 
Austin's  side.  As  he  playfully  reminds  us,  Shake- 
speare's father  was  a  wool-stapler;  Dante  belonged  to 
the  Guild  of  the  Woolcombers.  "  Such  mental  ances- 
try," says  the  autobiographer  with  perhaps  a  touch  of 
modesty,  "  may  inoffensively  be  recalled,  since  none  can 
hope  " — Mr.  Austin  has  an  old-world  grace  and  facility 
in  classical  allusion — "  to  approach  the  supreme  great- 
ness of  these  poetic  Dioscuri."  So  much  for  his  main 
inheritance  in  the  paternal  line.  The  blood  of  the 
Austins,  conspiring  with  Shakespeare,  Dante,  and  the 
Guild  of  the  Woolcombers,  determined  that  he  should 
be  a  poet. 

The  special  field  of  his  poetry,  however,  appears  to 
have  been  strongly  influenced  by  the  Hutton  strain 
which  came  to  him  through  his  grandmother.  Close 
attention  will  be  required  here,  for  heredity  is  a  slippery 
matter  at  the  best,  and  the  argument  runs  at  this  point 
through  a  narrow  defile :  Mr.  Austin  "  seems  to  remem- 
ber that  there  existed  a  floating  tradition  that  the 
Huttons  had  at  one  time  been  among  the  landed  gentry." 
Skeptical  biologists  may  cry  out  that  land  is  an  acquired 
non-transmissible  characteristic.  Socialists — of  which 
sect  there  were  none  in  the  England  of  the  elder  Hut- 
tons,  merry  England,  the  real  England,  the  England 
of  Mr.  Austin — socialists  are  said  to  hold  similar 
views. 

The  incontestable  fact  remains  that  Mr.  Austin  re- 
ceived from  the  Huttons,  or  from  somewhere,  an  impulse 


218     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

inclining  him  affectionately  tbward  land,  and  land  in 
large  parcels.  From  childhood,  he  tells  us,  he  has  ex- 
perienced "  a  passionate  clinging  to  the  country,  a  keen 
admiration  of  territorial  homes,  with  their  deer-parks 
and  wide-stretching  woodlands,  and  an  unconquerable 
antipathy,  of  a  most  prejudiced  character,  to  towns, 
mills,  and  manufactures."  At  first  thought  the  unwary 
reader  may  suspect  a  conflict  between  the  hereditary 
Austin  instinct  for  commerce  and  the  Hutton  impulse 
toward  the  serene  life  of  the  landed  gentry.  But  wool- 
stapling  as  well  as  the  business  of  owning  land,  we  are 
assured,  was  in  the  time  of  the  poet's  childhood  "  a 
singularly  light  occupation  "  with  ample  margins  for  a 
nine  o'clock  breakfast  and  a  half  hour's  lingering  before 
business  among  "  the  flowers,  the  poultry,  and  the 
pigeons." 

In  such  a  mold  heredity  cast  him.  "  Qualis  ab  in- 
cepto — "  says  Mr.  Austin ;  as  he  was  in  the  beginning, 
so  essentially  he  has  remained,  except  that  he  has  relin- 
quished the  Roman  faith  which  was  not  quite  English. 
He  came  into  the  world  with  a  few  strong  innate  ideas, 
and  has  neither  discarded  nor  added  many  since. 
Pigeons,  poultry,  and  flowers  surrounding  a  territorial 
home  with  background  and  foreground  of  deer-park 
and  wide-spreading  woodland — these  constitute  his  cen- 
tral conception  of  nature.  These  things  the  Laureate 
has  sung  with  sweetness  and  sincerity  both  in  prose  and 
in  verse — in  Veronica's  Garden,  Haunts  of  Ancient 
Peace,  and  in  many  a  lyric,  vernal,  aestival,  autumnal, 
and  hibernal.  None  but  a  resolutely  incredulous  critic 
would  question  his  knowledge  of  English  seasons;  and, 


TORYISM  OF  AUSTIN  219 

in  spite  of  his  deprecatory  "  such  gardening  knowl- 
edge as  I  may  later  have  acquired,"  there  is  no  rea- 
son for  doubting  his  intimate  acquaintance  with  Eng- 
lish flowers.  If  poetry  avails  at  all  in  these  evil  days, 
his  songs  must  have  done  something  toward  keeping 
alive  a  love  of  territorial  homes  in  the  hearts  of  their 
owners.  Nor  has  Mr.  Austin  confined  himself  to  groves 
and  gardens.  He  has  sung  also  of  man  and  especially 
of  woman — the  occupants  of  territorial  homes,  and  of 
all  the  prejudices  and  sentiments  that  uphold  and  beau- 
tify them. 

Though  not  a  poet  of  wide-ranging  passion,  he  has 
given  their  due  to  English  love,  courtship,  and  marriage. 
Summing  up  at  the  close  of  his  first  chapter  the  forces 
that  most  moved  his  childhood,  he  mentions  "  a  dim 
sense  of  the  magnetic  difference  of  the  sexes."  This 
sense  became  with  advancing  years  steadily  keener  with- 
out losing  any  of  its  pristine  quality.  In  witness 
whereof  read  the  naive  but  attractive  incident  of  the 
beautiful  chambermaid  of  Megara,  who — fleetingly 
beheld  in  the  evening — the  poet  hoped  might  wait  upon 
him  at  breakfast.  "  That  excusable  love  of  what  is 
beautiful,"  says  the  Laureate,  silently  distinguishing 
himself  from  an  earlier  Grecian  pilgrim,  "  was  disap- 
pointed." But  tarry!  As  Mr.  Austin  and  his  party, 
after  the  morning  meal,  were  setting  forth  on  their 
journey,  the  fair  one  appeared  for  a  moment  in  the 
doorway.  They  doffed  their  hats.  She  inclined  her 
head.  They  drove  away  to  Eleusis,  never  to  see  her 
more.  Mr.  Austin  exclaims  in  another  prose  work  of 
his  containing  certain  strictures  on  Shelley :  "  What  a 


220     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

fortunate  circumstance  it  has  been  for  the  English 
people,  that  they  can  respect  as  well  as  admire  their 
greatest  writers.  .  .  .  Chaucer,  Spenser,  Shakespeare, 
Milton,  Wordsworth,  Tennyson,  all  good  reputable  citi- 
zens, all  pillars  of  the  Commonwealth,  strengthening 
England  by  their  conduct  as  much  as  by  their  genius." 
The  maturer  phase  of  this  sense  of  the  "  magnetic 
difference  "  and  its  important  place  in  Mr.  Austin's  work 
are  symbolically  adumbrated  in  the  poem  called  In  the 
Heart  of  the  Forest.  The  poet,  accosting  the  shrilling 
missel-thrush,  inquires  the  meaning  of  his  music : 

Then  louder,  still  louder  he  shrilled:  I  sing 
For  the  pleasure  and  pride  of  shrilling, 

For  the  sheen  and  the  sap  and  the  showers  of  spring 
That  fill  me  to  overfilling. 

Yet  a  something  deeper  than  Springtime,  though 
It  is  Spring-like,  my  throat  keeps  flooding: 

Peep  soft  at  my  mate, — she  is  there  below, — 
Where  the  bramble  trails  are  budding. 

She  sits  on  the  nest  and  she  never  stirs; 

She  is  true  to  the  trust  I  gave  her  ; 
And  what  were  my  love  if  I  cheered  not  hers 

As  long  as  my  throat  can  quaver. 

In  this  shy  lyric,  Mr.  Austin  hints  darkly  at  the  true 
solution  of  the  vexed  woman  question.  Fortunately  I 
am  able  to  illuminate  this  matter  by  a  gloss  extracted 
from  the  series  of  articles  which  he  contributed  to  the 
Spectator  in  1894,  reporting  his  researches  through 
England  for  "  haunts  of  ancient  peace."  One  of  these 


TORYISM  OF  AUSTIN  221 

haunts  was  the  household  of  the  fourth  Countess  of 
Leicester.  "  Iii  the  church  at  Penshurst,  where  we  abode 
that  night,"  says  our  author,  "  there  is  a  monument  to 
the  fourth  Countess  of  Leicester,  and  on  it  is  recorded, 
presumably  in  obedience  to  her  own  wish  (my  italics), 
that  *  Her  sole  desire  was  to  make  a  good  wife  and  good 
mother.'  Could  there  be  a  nobler  ambition?  And  shall 
I  be  forgiven  if  I  add  that  when  the  little  *  emancipat- 
ing '  hubbub  of  our  day  has  subsided,  the  ineradicable 
instinct  of  women  will  re-echo  that  devout  and  humble 
vow?" 

In  the  seventeen  years  since  these  lines  were  written 
the  "  little  *  emancipating '  hubbub  "  does  not  seem  to 
have  subsided  much.  While  Mr.  Austin  was  penning 
the  pages  of  his  autobiography,  young  women  wearing 
a  bandeau  inscribed  with  the  motto  "  Votes  for  Women  " 
were  parading  in  Piccadilly.  The  tumult,  however,  has 
not  reached  the  Laureate  among  the  primroses  and  lady- 
smocks  of  Swinford  Old  Manor.  While  we  who  do  not 
live  in  territorial  homes  have  been  asking,  Ou  sont  les 
neiges  d" 'ant an? — "  where  are  the  wives  who  sit  on  the 
nest  and  never  stir  ?  ",  he  has  sung  on  imperturbably , 
celebrating  the  Lucille,  the  Dora,  the  Maud  of  the  mid- 
Victorian  dream — the  fair  and  lissome  English  maiden 
blushing  and  trembling  toward  her  lover  and  her  lord 
with  the  reverence  implanted  in  her  unsunned  bosom  by 
God  and  Nature. 

The  remote  charm  that  invests  Mr.  Austin's  concep- 
tion of  the  eternal-feminine  pervades  also  his  picture  of 
man  in  family  relations — a  picture  which  helps  us,  since 
the  family  is  a  little  image  of  the  State,  to  understand 


222     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

his  political  ideals.  For  men  of  the  modern  democratic 
way  of  thinking,  marriage  exists  in  order  to  give  repre- 
sentation to  the  Opposition.  When  a  man  marries,  as 
we  view  the  matter,  he  grants  voice  and  vote  to  his 
sharpest  and  most  remorseless  critic.  And  this  conces- 
sion, most  of  us  are  agreed,  whatever  difficulties  may 
attend  it,  is  good  for  the  government.  To  Mr.  Austin, 
on  the  other  hand,  ideal  marriage  means  a  man's  quiet 
and  unchallenged  assumption  of  the  domestic  throne  of 
his  fathers  and  his  mild  paternal  reign  over  devoted  and 
adoring  subjects.  But  why  blunder  toward  this  lofty 
idea  in  prose  when  the  Laureate  has  already  embodied 
it  in  poetry  of  inimitable  clearness  and  simplicity?  In 
quoting  from  his  lines  on  "  Wordsworth  at  Dove  Cot- 
tage "  I  shall  be  following  his  own  practice  in  dealing 
with  matters  ineffable  in  the  baser  medium.  Recurring 
to  the  figure  of  the  missel-thrush,  he  declares  that 
Fame's  sweetest  minister  is  "  she  who  broods  upon  one's 
name,  but  calls  it  not  aloud  " ;  then  addressing  Words- 
worth : 

And  this  at  least,  in  full,  you  had, 

From  sister,  and  from  wife: 
They  made  your  gravest  moments  glad, 

They  havened  you  from  strife; 
Hallowed  your  verse,  revered  your  tread, 
Maintained  a  nimbus  round  your  head 

And  deified  your  life. 

Now  the  nimbus  as  a  domestic  ornament  is  no  more 
hopelessly  out  of  date  than  the  whole  social  and  political 
order  which  Mr.  Austin  has  celebrated.  In  1790  Burke 
saw  it  already  in  the  last  ditch ;  because  it  was  no  more, 


TORYISM  OF  AUSTIN 

Carlyle  declared  that  the  nations  were  hurtling  pell-mell 
into  the  Pit ;  Buskin  loved  it  still  with  a  passionate  re- 
gret as  an  exile  in  a  strange  land.  It  remained  for  Mr. 
Austin  to  declare  that  it  has  not  been  and  never  shall 
be  shaken.  His  present  attitude  toward  internal  affairs 
may  be  suggested  by  the  postscript  to  a  letter  of  his  in 
The  Times,  which  he  has  deemed  worthy  a  place  near  the 
close  of  his  autobiography.  The  sentiment,  indorsed  by 
Mr.  Austin,  was  originally  uttered  by  the  Comte 
d'Haussonville,  nephew  of  the  Due  de  Broglie,  and  friend 
of  the  Due  d'Aumale,  "  and  whose  reception  by  the 
Academie  Fran9aise  I  had  the  good  fortune  to  attend, 
taken  there  by  the  late  Lord  Lytton  when  English 
Ambassador  in  Paris — "  etc.  Here  is  the  sentiment: 
"  The  speeches  of  members  of  the  House  of  Lords  dur- 
ing the  Election,  so  superior,  even  as  platform  oratory, 
to  those  delivered  by  the  members  of  the  House  of  Com- 
mons with  one  or  two  exceptions,  would  alone  suffice  to 
save  from  successful  attack  any  assault  upon  its 
existence." 

With  democracy  long  since  triumphant,  with  socialism 
on  foot,  while  dynamite  is  laid  in  broad  daylight  under 
the  House  of  Lords,  Mr.  Austin  still  confronts  the  times 
with  comfortable  mien  and  inquires  whether  we  shall 
exchange  for  a  modern  democracy  without  a  throne, 
with  no  towers,  with  "  mean  plots  without  a  tree " 
(small  holdings  cultivated  by  the  owners?),  a  "  herd  of 
hinds  too  equal  to  be  free,"  dwelling  together  in  "  greed, 
jealousy,  envy,  hate,  and  all  uncharity " — shall  the 
gentlemen  of  England  barter  for  this,  he  asks,  "  our 
ancient,  unaltered  Motherland,"  "  where  sweet  Order 


224:  ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

now  breathes  cadenced  tone,"  with  its  "  hamlets  meek," 
its  lambs  going  "  safe  to  the  ewes  "  and  its  "  calves  to 
the  udder,"  its  yearlings  fattening,  its  heifers  browsing, 
its  "  whistling  yokels  "  guiding  the  "  gleaming  share  " 
hard  by  the  home  where  "  gentle  lordship  dwells,"  in 
country-seats  with  their  "  woodland  amenity,"  where 
"  comely  domain  marches  with  comely  domain,"  and  the 
plumped  pheasant  peeps  through  the  boskage  over  "  pas- 
toral downs,  as  little  changed  since  the  time  of  Egbert 
as  the  sea  itself"?  "Shall  this  exchange  be  made?", 
cries  the  Laureate  in  feigned  and  rhetorical  consterna- 
tion. "  Banish  the  fear ! ",  he  replies  in  his  poem  called 
"  Why  England  is  Conservative,"  "  Look  Seaward,  Sen- 
tinel," and  in  many  another  patriotic  lay  of  unique  and 
incomparable  insolence.  While  the  "  wild-beast  mob  " 
of  the  nations  whine  with  envy  at  her  peace  and  pros- 
perity, or  roaring  and  sweating  under  their  armor, 
menace  her  across  the  "  bastions  of  the  brine,"  she 
towers  and  shall  forever  tower  supreme,  "  victor  without 
a  blow,"  "  smilingly  leaning "  on  her  "  undrawn 

sword  " 

I  have  made  this  review  of  Mr.  Austin's  leading  ideas 
because  it  has  been  falsely  rumored  that  he  has  none.  It 
should  now  be  apparent  that,  far  from  being  content 
with  the  fame  of  an  idle  pastoralist,  he  challenges  recog- 
nition as  a  poetical  representative  of  the  conservative 
spirit.  It  should  also  be  clear  that  the  value  of  his  rep- 
resentation is  impaired  by  his  complete  identification  of 
conservatism  with  Toryism — a  confusion  due  to  his 
obliviousness  to  the  flight  of  time.  I  suppose  it  is  more 
or  less  of  the  essence  of  genuine  Toryism  to  confound 


TORYISM  OF  AUSTIN  225 

the  amenity  and  stability  of  one's  own  fireside  with  the 
Welfare  of  the  country;  in  so  far  as  that  is  true  Mr. 
Austin  seems  to  be  a  good  Tory.  In  his  system  of  ideas, 
furthermore,  I  can  detect  little  that  would  have  been 
repugnant  to  the  sense  of  a  country  gentleman  in  the 
reign  of  Farmer  George.  But  the  possible  historical 
value  of  his  expression  of  Toryism  is  destroyed  by  a 
serious  anachronism:  the  foundation  on  which  his 
Georgian  ideas  rest,  the  sentiment  which  suffuses  them, 
and  the  artistic  coloring  which  invests  them  are  mid- 
Victorian.  Mr.  Austin  upholds  the  House  of  Lords,  the 
territorial  homes,  and  the  whistling  yokel  not  like  a  true 
blue  Tory — because  they  were  ordained  by  God;  nor 
like  the  later  philosophical  Tory — because  they  were 
ordained  by  nature ;  but  like  the  unphilosophical,  athe- 
istical, pseudo-Catholic  Pre-Raphaelites — because  they 
are  aesthetically  gratifying.  That  explains  his  "  un- 
conquerable antipathy  "  to  towns,  mills,  and  manufac- 
tures, and  at  the  same  time  his  fondness  for  depicting 
Britannia  leaning  smilingly  on  her  undrawn  sword. 
That  is  why  he  hates  and  fears  liberalism,  and  at  the 
same  time  makes  conservatism  ridiculous  by  representing 
it  as  invincible.  That  is  why  his  poems,  if  read,  and  his 
picture  of  happy  England  might  loosen  all  the  bricks 
in  the  pavements  of  Manchester  and  Liverpool.  For  the 
sentimental  romantic  Toryism  of  Mr.  Austin  is  not  so 
much  dull  as  false ;  false  and  at  the  same  time  obsolete ; 
obsolete  but  not  yet  old  enough  to  have  acquired  an 
antiquarian  interest. 


IX 

THE  AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF 
HENRY  JAMES 

"  No  one  has  the  faintest  conception  of  what  I  am 
trying  for,"  says  the  celebrated  novelist  in  The  Death 
of  the  Lion,  "  and  not  many  have  read  three  pages  that 
I've  written;  but  I  must  dine  with  them  first — they'll 
find  out  when  they've  time."  These  words  are  tinged 
with  Henry  James's  own  disdain  of  the  fashionable 
world  which  wears,  and  wears  out,  a  man  of  genius  like 
a  spangle  on  its  robe.  They  are  tinged  too  with  the 
mixed  regret  and  satisfaction  of  an  author  who  knew 
what  it  was  to  grow  too  fine  for  one's  public.  Born  in 
1843,  James  established  in  the  seventies  and  eighties  of 
the  last  century  the  kind  of  reputation  that  calls  for 
French  and  German  translations.  He  lived  to  hear  the 
wits  of  the  late  nineties  and  the  following  decade  calling 
for  the  translation  of  his  maturest  works  into  English. 
Perhaps  twenty  years  ago  every  one  had  read,  or  had 
attempted  to  read,  a  recent  novel  of  his ;  but  there  has 
come  up  a  generation  of  young  people  who  have  been 
permitted,  with  the  connivance  of  critics,  to  concede  the 
excellence  of  his  earlier  productions  and  the  "  impossi- 
bility "  of  his  later  ones  without  looking  into  either. 
Shortly  before  his  death  in  1916  he  emerged  for  the 
general  public  from  his  obscure  memoir-writing,  and 


AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  JAMES      227 

stood  for  a  moment  conspicuous  on  the  sky-line — a  dark 
august  figure  bowed  in  devout  allegiance  beneath  the 
English  flag ;  then  with  a  thunder  of  ordnance  not  made 
for  his  passing  he  slipped  below  the  horizon.  In  the 
hour  of  trial  he  had  given  to  England  a  beautiful  ges- 
ture, which  derived  much  of  its  interest  from  his  life- 
long refusal  to  commit  himself  to  any  cause  but  art. 
Though  the  adoption  of  English  citizenship  by  an  Amer- 
ican would  have  excited  in  ordinary  circumstances  the 
profane  wit  of  our  paragraph-writers,  the  gravity  of 
this  occasion  chastened  them;  and  when,  a  few  months 
later,  his  death  called  for  comment,  many  of  them 
clutched  at  this  transferral  of  allegiance  as  the  last,  if 
not  the  only,  intelligible  performance  of  his  that  was 
known  to  them.  Some  of  them,  to  be  sure,  remembered, 
or  said  they  remembered,  Daisy  Miller  as  a  "  perfect 
little  thing  of  its  kind,"  or  professed  a  not  unpleasant 
acquaintance  with  the  Portrait  of  a  Lady,  or  even  ex- 
hibited a  vague  consciousness  that  the  novelist  had 
treated  extensively  the  "  international  situation,"  but 
in  general  they  betrayed  their  "  unpreparedness  "  for 
defining  his  talent  and  valuing  his  accomplishment. 

Criticism  should  have  declared  by  this  time,  and 
should  have  declared  with  emphasis  and  authority,  what 
Henry  James  was  "  trying  for."  It  should  also  have 
declared  whether,  when  he  slipped  below  the  horizon,  he 
sank  into  the  deepening  shadows  of  literary  history,  or 
whether  he  passed  on  into  a  widening  world  of  light — 
the  Great  Good  Place  of  a  grateful  and  enlightened  pos- 
terity which  will  not  dine  with  him  but  which  will  read 
him.  May  we  securely  let  him  pass  while  we  go  on  to 


228     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

something  better ;  or  shall  we  find,  if  we  go  on,  that  he 
is  the  something  better  to  which  we  come  at  last  ?  There 
are  wide  differences  of  opinion  in  the  critical  jury.  Mr. 
Brownell,  who  has  said  a  multitude  of  penetrating  things 
about  his  mind  and  his  art,  and  who  is,  one  should  sup- 
pose, the  critic  in  America  best  qualified  to  enjoy  and 
to  value  him,  does  not  conceal  his  quiet  hope  and  expec- 
tation that  among  the  novelists  of  the  future  we  shall 
not  meet  his  like  again.  Professor  Pattee,  who  is  "  out  " 
for  American  local  colors  and  big  native  American  ideas, 
declares  in  so  many  words  that  Henry  James's  novels 
"  really  accomplish  nothing."  Recent  English  criticism 
strikes  up  in  another  key.  Mr.  Ford  Maddox  Hueffer 
promises  him  immortality,  if  there  is  any  immortality 
for  extraordinarily  fine  work — a  point  about  which  he 
is  doubtful;  but  he  struggles  to  this  handsome  conclu- 
sion through  such  fantastic  arguments,  with  such  explo- 
sions of  temper  and  erratic  judgment,  through  such  a 
stream  of  "  Godforbids  "  and  "  Thankgods  "  and  "  God- 
knowses,"  with  such  a  display  of  the  new  literary  bad 
manners,  that  one  wonders  how  he  ever  came  to  occupy 
himself  with  an  author  so  dedicated  to  refinement.  The 
little  book  of  Miss  Rebecca  West,  an  acutely  positive 
and  intensely  glowing  young  "  intellectual,"  has  delight- 
ful merits:  its  adverse  criticism  is  cuttingly  phrased  if 
not  always  precisely  keen,  its  appreciative  passages  are 
full  of  fresh  ardor  and  luminous  if  not  always  illuminat- 
ing imagery ;  it  holds  up  a  candle  and  swings  a  censer 
in  the  principal  niches  and  chapels  of  the  wide-arching 
cathedral  upon  which  the  builder  toiled  for  half  a  cen- 
tury ;  but  it  rather  evades  the  task  of  presenting  a  final 


AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  JAMES      229 

comprehensive  view — of  explaining,  in  short,  in  the 
honor  of  what  deity  the  whole  edifice  was  constructed. 

Let  us  cut  an  avenue  to  the  inner  shrine  by  removing 
from  consideration  some  of  the  objects  for  which  most 
of  his  American  and  English  compatriots  profess  a 
pious  veneration.  Henry  James  has  insulted  all  the 
popular  gods  of  democratic  society — for  example,  the 
three  persons  of  the  French  revolutionary  trinity  and 
$he  "  sovereign  people  "  collectively.  Captain  Sholto, 
almost  unique  among  his  characters  in  uttering  a  politi- 
cal thought,  must  express  pretty  nearly  his  creator's 
position  when  he  says,  "  I  believe  those  that  are  on  top, 
the  heap  are  better  than  those  that  are  under  it,  that 
they  mean  to  stay  there,  and  that  if  they  are  not  a  pack 
of  poltroons  they  will."  It  would  be  difficult  to  name 
an  American  author  more  perfectly  devoid  of  emotional 
interest  in  the  general  mass  of  humanity.  His  attitude 
toward  the  "  submerged  tenth  "  is  chiefly  established  by 
his  silence  with  regard  to  it.  In  The  Princess  Casamas- 
sima,  one  of  the  rare  places  in  which  he  permits  a  view 
of  the  dark  Netherward  of  society  to  fall  upon  the  eye 
of  a  sensitive  observer,  this  is  the  reported  reaction: 
j<  Some  of  the  women  and  girls,  in  particular,  were 
ippalling — saturated  with  alcohol  and  vice,  brutal,  be- 
draggled, obscene.  '  What  remedy  but  another  deluge, 
alchemy  but  annihilation?  '  he  asked  himself  as  he 
his  way ;  and  he  wondered  what  fate  there  could  be, 
in  the  great  scheme  of  things,  for  a  planet  overgrown 
with  such  vermin,  what  redemption  but  to  be  hurled 
against  a  ball  of  consuming  fire."  The  passage  is  a  little 
deficient,  is  it  not?  in  warm  fraternal  feeling.  Let  us 


230     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

round  out  this  impression  with  the  reported  reaction  of 
a  sensitive  observer  in  The  Madonna  of  the  Future  to 
a  little  glimpse  of  free  life  in  Rome :  "  Cats  and 
monkeys,  monkeys  and  cats ;  all  human  life  is  there !  " 
These  sensitive  observers  doubtless  had  cause  for  a 
shudder  of  revulsion,  and  dramatic  reason  as  well. 
Their  behavior  becomes  interesting  when  one  compares 
it  with  James's  personal  account  in  London  Notes  of  his 
own  attitude  toward  a  very  different  scene — the  prepa- 
rations for  the  Victoria  Jubilee.  "  The  foremost,  the 
immense  impression  is  of  course  the  constant,  the  perma- 
nent, the  ever-supreme — the  impression  of  that  greatest 
glory  of  our  race,  its  passionate  feeling  for  trade.  .  .  . 
London  has  found  in  this  particular  chapter  of  the 
career  of  its  aged  sovereign  only  an  enormous  adver- 
tisement." Later  he  reports  that  he  has  been  taking 
refuge  from  the  Jubilee  in  novel-reading.  The  great 
thing  to  be  said  for  the  novelists,  he  adds,  is  "  that  at 
any  given  moment  they  offer  us  another  world,  another 
consciousness,  an  experience  that,  as  effective  as  the 
dentist's  ether,  muffles  the  ache  of  the  actual  and,  by 
helping  us  to  an  interval,  tides  us  over  and  makes  us 
face,  in  the  return  to  the  inevitable,  a  combination  that 
may  at  least  have  changed."  Was  it  a  pose  to  speak  of 
fiction  as  an  ethereal  pause  in  the  midst  of  the  perpetual 
toothache  of  the  actual — and  of  a  great  patriotic  demon- 
stration as  a  peculiarly  sharp  toothache?  Or  was  it 
"  American  humor  "?  The  pose,  if  pose  it  was,  is  curi- 
ously of  a  piece  with  his  saying  to  John  Hay,  who  had 
been  received  with  an  "  ovation  "  on  his  arrival  in  South- 
ampton, "  What  impression  does  it  make  in  your  mind 


AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  JAMES      231 

to  have  these  insects  creeping  about  you  and  saying 
things  to  you?  " 

A  partial  explanation  of  this  disgust  and  this  detach- 
ment from  the  major  interests  of  the  majority  of  men 
may  be  found  in  a  half-dozen  familiar  facts  of  his 
biographical  record:  the  peculiar  genius  of  his  Sweden- 
borgian  father,  his  early  induction  in  old  New  York, 
his  birthplace,  into  "  the  religion  of  foreign  things,"  his 
foreign  language  teachers,  his  early  perusal  of  the 
London  Punch  and  his  devotion,  a  little  later,  to  the 
Revue  des  Deux  Mondes,  his  glimpses  in  childhood  of 
London  and  the  Continent,  his  artistic  apprenticeship 
under  John  la  Farge,  his  trifling  contact  with  the 
Harvard  Law  School,  his  serious  contact  as  reviewer 
with  the  New  York  Nation  and  with  the  Atlantic 
Monthly,  his  discovery  of  a  fine  vein  of  fiction,  and  the 
permanent  settlement  of  his  residence  abroad.  The 
leading  idea  in  the  elder  James's  plan  for  his  son's  life 
seems  to  have  been  to  rescue  him  from  the  typical  demo- 
cratic process  in  order  to  open  to  him  some  finer  destiny : 
to  provide  him  with  comfortable  means  and  ample  leis- 
ure, to  save  him  from  every  exacting  pressure,  to  pre- 
serve him  from  the  stamp  of  any  definite  educational 
system,  by  perpetual  migrations  to  snap  the  root  of 
local  attachments,  to  postpone  for  him  as  long  as  pos- 
sible the  choice  of  a  career,  so  that  at  last  the  young 
man  should  be  whatever  he  was  and  do  whatever  he  did 
by  the  free  impulse  of  his  own  spirit.  The  perfect 
working  of  this  plan  was  probably  marred  by  a  physical 
accident  at  the  time  of  the  Civil  War,  which  as  Henry 
James  circuitously  explains,  assigned  him  to  the  role 


232     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

of  an  engrossed  spectator.  Whatever  the  significance 
of  this  incident,  the  result  of  the  plan  of  tasting  life  in 
New  York,  Boston,  Geneva,  London,  Paris,  Rome,  Flor- 
ence, and  Venice  was  to  set  up  an  endless  process  of 
observation,  comparison,  discrimination,  selection,  and 
appreciation — a  process  which  for  this  highly  civilized, 
highly  sensitized  young  spirit,  became  all-absorbing, 
and  made  of  him  a  fastidious  connoisseur  of  experience, 
an  artistic  celibate  to  whose  finer  sense  promiscuous 
mixing  in  the  gross  welter  of  the  world  was  wearisome 
and  unprofitable. 

There  is  no  getting  round  the  fact  that  he  was  as  pro- 
digiously "  superior  "  inside  as  he  was  outside  the  field 
of  art.  In  his  recent  much  quoted  essay  on  the  New 
Novel  he  has  the  air  of  a  conscious  old  master  conde- 
scending for  the  nonce  to  notice  "  the  rough  and  tumble 
*  output '  "  of  the  young  vulgar  democratic  herd.  A 
false  note  in  Miss  West's  treatment  of  his  character  is 
her  remark  that  he  lacked  "  that  necessary  attribute  of 
the  good  critic,  the  power  to  bid  bad  authors  to  go  to 
the  devil."  Mr.  Brownell,  on  the  other  hand,  puts  some 
of  his  work  at  the  head  of  American  criticism.  His 
Hawthorne,  his  Partial  Portraits,  his  Essays  in  London 
and  Elsewhere,  his  Notes  on  Novelists,  his  various  "  por- 
traits "  of  cities  and  "  scenes,"  including  The  American 
Scene,  and  his  introductions  to  his  own  novels  constitute 
certainly  an  impressive  body  of  literary  and  social  criti- 
cism of  unique  quality  and  high  interest.  As  for  the 
"  necessary  attribute,"  he  sent  authors  to  their  appro- 
priate places  so  civilly  and  suavely  that  they  probably 
failed  frequently  to  notice  where  they  were  sent ;  but  no 


AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  JAMES      233 

critic  ever  more  remorselessly  sent  to  the  devil  bad 
authors,  mediocre  authors,  and  even  very  distinguished 
authors.  In  his  later  years,  he  very  blandly,  very 
courteously,  sent  the  whole  general  public  to  the  devil. 
He  was  mortally  weary  of  the  general  public's  obtuse- 
ness  ;  he  despaired  of  the  general  public,  and  despised  it. 
At  the  same  time  he  reiterated  in  his  stories,  his  critical 
articles,  and  in  the  prefaces  to  the  New  York  edition  of 
his  work  challenges  and  entreaties  to  the  critical  few 
to  come  and  find  him. 

In  that  fascinating  work  The  Figure  in  the  Carpet  he 
depicts,  for  criticism,  what  he  would  have  called  his 
own  "  case."  He  presents  there,  amid  various  intensi- 
fications of  interest,  Hugh  Vereker,  a  master-novelist, 
head  and  shoulders  above  his  contemporaries;  so  that 
even  his  devoutest  admirers  and  his  most  studious  critics 
miss  the  thing  that  he  has  written  his  books  "  most  for." 
"  Isn't  there,"  he  says  to  one  of  them,  "  for  every 
writer  a  particular  thing  of  that  sort,  the  thing  that 
most  makes  him  apply  himself,  the  thing  without  the 
effort  to  achieve  which  he  wouldn't  write  at  all,  the  very 
passion  of  his  passion,  the  part  of  the  business  in  which, 
for  him,  the  flame  of  art  burns  most  intensely?  .  . 
There's  an  idea  in  my  work  without  which  I  wouldn't 
have  given  a  straw  for  the  whole  job.  ...  It  stretches, 
this  little  trick  of  mine,  from  book  to  book,  and  every- 
thing else,  comparatively,  plays  over  the  surface  of  it. 
The  order,  the  form,  the  texture  of  my  books  will  per- 
haps constitute  for  the  initiated  a  complete  represen- 
tation of  it.  So  it  is  naturally  the  thing  for  the 
critic  to  look  for.  It  strikes  me,"  Vereker  adds — smil- 


ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

ing  but  inscrutable,  "  even  as  the  thing  for  the  critic 
to  find." 

The  thing  which  James  hoped  chiefly  that  his  critics 
would  some  day  recognize  is  not  that  he  is  a  great  stylist, 
or  a  learned  historian  of  manners,  or  the  chief  of  the 
realists,  or  a  master  of  psychological  analysis.  All 
these  things  have  been  noted  and  asserted  by  various 
more  or  less  irreligious  strollers  through  that  cathedral- 
like  edifice  to  which  we  have  likened  his  works.  The 
thing  which  he  as  the  high  priest  solemnly  ministering 
before  the  high  altar  implored  some  one  to  observe  and 
to  declare  and  to  explain  is  that  he  adored  beauty  and 
absolutely  nothing  else  in  the  world.  To  the  discovery 
of  beauty  he  dedicates  his  observation,  his  analysis,  his 
marvelous  and  all-too-little  recognized  imaginative  en- 
ergy. That  is  why  he  sends  the  rest  of  the  world  to  the 
devil,  that  is  his  romance,  that  is  his  passion,  that  is 
why  when  he  discusses  his  own  creations  he  talks  verit- 
ably like  a  soul  in  bliss.  The  intimate  relation  of  his 
fiction  to  modern  realities  beguiles  the  uncritical  reader 
into  an  erroneous  notion  that  he  is  a  "  transcriber,"  a 
literal  copyist,  of  life.  What  in  his  prefaces  he  begs 
us  again  and  again  to  believe  is  that  his  stories  origi- 
nated in  mere  granules  and  g«rms  of  reality  blown  by 
chance  breezes  to  the  rich  soil  of  the  garden  of  his 
imagination,  where  they  took  root,  and  sprang  up,  and 
flowered;  then  they  were  transplanted  with  infinite  art 
to  the  garden  of  literature.  What  he  offers  us,  as  he 
repeatedly  suggests,  is  a  thousandfold  better  than  life; 
it  is  an  escape  from  life.  It  is  an  escape  from  the  unde- 
signed into  the  designed,  from  chaos  into  order,  from 


AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  JAMES      235 

the  undiscriminated  into  the  finely  assorted,  from  the 
languor  of  the  irrelevant  to  the  intensity  of  the  perti- 
nent. It  is  not  reality ;  he  goes  so  far  as  to  say  quite 
expressly  that  it  is  poetry.  If  that  is  true,  his  novels 
should,  in  spite  of  Professor  Pattee,  "  accomplish " 
something ;  they  should  give  us  on  the  one  hand  an  ideal 
and  on  the  other  hand  a  criticism ;  and  they  do  give  us 
both.  Henry  James's  importance  for  Anglo-Saxons  in 
general  and  for  Americans  in  particular  is  that  he  is 
the  first  novelist  writing  in  English  to  offer  us  on  a 
grand  scale  a  purely  aesthetic  criticism  of  modern 
society  and  modern  fiction. 

His  special  distinction  among  writers  of  prose  fiction 
is  in  the  exclusiveness  of  his  consecration  to  beauty — a 
point  which  in  this  connection  probably  requires  eluci- 
dation. To  the  religious  consciousness  all  things  are 
ultimately  holy  or  unholy;  to  the  moral  consciousness 
all  things  are  ultimately  good  or  evil;  to  the  scientific 
consciousness  all  things  are  ultimately  true  or  not  true ; 
to  Henry  James  all  things  are  ultimately  beautiful  or 
ugly.  In  few  men  but  fanatics  and  geniuses  does  any 
one  type  of  consciousness  hold  undivided  sway,  and  even 
among  the  geniuses  and  fanatics  of  the  English  race  the 
pure  aesthetic  type  was  till  Ruskin's  time  excessively 
rare.  The  normal  English  consciousness  is,  for  pur- 
poses of  judgment,  a  courthouse  of  several  floors  and 
courts,  to  each  of  which  are  distributed  the  cases  proper 
to  that  jurisdiction.  In  the  criticism  of  Matthew 
Arnold,  for  example,  there  are  distinct  courts  for  the 
adjudication  of  spiritual,  ecclesiastical,  moral,  aesthetic, 
political,  social,  and  scientific  questions;  but  Ruskin 


236     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

handles  all  matters  in  the  aesthetic  chamber.  In  Shake- 
speare's criticism  of  life,  to  take  the  case  of  a  creative 
artist,  the  discrimination  of  experience  proceeds  on 
clearly  distinguishable  levels  of  consciousness;  the  ex- 
quisite judgment  of  Sylvia — "  holy,  fair,  and  wise  is 
she  " — is  a  certificate  of  character  from  three  distinct 
courts.  But  Henry  James,  on  the  contrary,  receives 
and  attempts  to  judge  all  the  kinds  of  his  experience  on 
the  single  crowded,  swarming,  humming  level  of  the 
aesthetic  consciousness ;  the  apartments  above  and  bekm 
are  vacant. 

It  is  a  much  simpler  task  to  indicate  his  position  in 
literature  with  reference  to  the  nature  of  his  conscious- 
ness than  with  reference  to  the  forms  of  his  art.  Critics 
attempting  to  "  place  "  him  have  said  the  most  bewil- 
dering things  about  his  relationship  to  Richardson, 
Dickens,  George  Eliot,  Trollope,  George  Meredith, 
Stevenson,  Tourgenieff,  Balzac,  the  Goncourts,  Flau- 
bert, Maupassant,  Zola,  and  Daudet.  To  say  that  he  is 
the  disciple  of  this  galaxy  is  to  say  everything  and 
nothing.  He  knew  intimately  modern  literature  and 
many  of  its  producers  in  England,  France,  Italy,  and 
Russia,  and  he  is  related  to  them  all  as  we  are  all  related 
to  Adam — and  to  the  sun  and  the  moon  and  the  weather. 
He  doubtless  learned  something  of  art  from  each  of 
them,  for  he  took  instruction  wherever  he  could  find 
it — even  from  "  Gyp,"  as  he  blushingly  confesses  in  the 
preface  to  The  Awkward  Age.  But  what  different  gods 
were  worshiped  in  this  galaxy !  Even  Meredith,  who 
resembles  him  in  his  psychological  inquisitiveness,  does 
not  in  nine-tenths  of  his  novels  remotely  resemble  him 


AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  JAMES      237 

in  form ;  moreover,  Meredith  is  a  moralist,  a  sage,  a 
mystic,  and  a  lyrical  worshiper  of  Life,  Nature,  and 
other  such  loose  divinities.  James  called  Balzac  "  the 
master  of  us  all,"  he  called  Tourgenieff  "  the  beautiful 
genius,"  he  sympathized  intensely  with  Flaubert's  dedi- 
cation to  perfection ;  but  his  total  representation  of  life 
is  not  much  more  like  that  of  any  of  his  "  masters  " 
than  George  Eliot's  is  like  Zola's. 

It  is  a  curious  fact  that  while  American  criticism 
tends  to  refer  him  to  Europe,  English  criticism  tends  to 
refer  him  to  America.  A  pretty  argument,  indeed,  could 
be  constructed  to  prove  that  he  might  have  been  very 
much  what  he  was,  if  he  had  not  gone  body  and  soul  to 
Europe,  but  had  simply  roved  up  and  down  the  Atlantic 
coast  comparing  the  grave  conscience  of  Boston  and  the 
open  and  skyey  mind  of  Concord  with  the  luxurious 
body  and  vesture  of  New  York  and  the  antique  "  gentil- 
ity "  of  Richmond — comparing  the  harvested  impres- 
sions of  these  scenes,  and  weaving  into  new  patterns  the 
finer  threads  which  American  tradition  had  put  into 
his  hands:  Hawthorne's  brooding  moral  introspection, 
his  penetration  of  the  shadowed  quietudes  of  the  heart, 
his  love  of  still  people  and  quiet  places,  his  golden 
thread  of  imagery  beaded  with  brave  symbolism,  the 
elaborated  euphony  of  his  style ;  Irving's  bland  pleasure 
in  the  rich  surface  of  things,  his  delight  in  manorial 
dwellings,  his  sense  of  the  glamour  of  history,  his  tem- 
peramental and  stylistic  mellowness  and  clarity,  his 
worldly  well-bred  air  of  being  "  at  ease  in  Zion  " ;  Poe's 
artistic  exclusiveness,  his  artistic  intelligence,  his  inten- 
sity, his  conscious  craftsmanship,  his  zest  for  discussing 


the  creative  process  and  the  technique  of  literature.  As 
a  matter  of  fact,  Henry  James  does  "join  on  "  to  the 
eastern  American  traditions;  he  gathers  up  all  these 
enumerated  threads;  he  assimilates  all  these  forms  of 
consciousness.  Hawthorne  plays  into  his  hands  for 
depth  and  inwardness,  Irving  for  outwardness  and  en- 
richment, and  Poe  for  vividness  and  intensity. 

The  result  of  this  fusion  of  types  is  a  spacious  and 
richly  sophisticated  type  of  the  aesthetic  consciousness 
of  which  the  closest  English  analogue  is  that  of  Walter 
Pater.  James  is  like  Pater  in  his  aversion  from  the 
world,  his  dedication  to  art,  his  celibacy,  his  personal 
decorum  and  dignity,  his  high  aesthetic  seriousness,  his 
Epicurean  relish  in  receiving  and  reporting  the  multi- 
plicity and  intensity  of  his  impressions,  and  in  the  ex- 
acting closeness  of  his  style.  There  are  distinctions  in 
plenty  to  be  made  by  any  one  curious  enough  to  under- 
take the  comparison ;  but  on  the  whole  there  is  no  better 
side  light  on  James's  "  philosophy  "  than  Pater's  Con- 
clusion to  the  Studies  in  the  Renaissance  and  his  Plato 
and  Platonism;  no  better  statement  of  his  general  lit- 
erary ideals  than  Pater's  essay  on  Style ;  no  more  inter- 
esting "  parallel "  to  his  later  novels  than  Marius  the 
Epicurean  and  Imaginary  Portraits.  To  make  the  mat- 
ter a  little  more  specific  let  the  curious  inquirer  compare 
the  exposure  of  Pater's  consciousness  which  is  ordi- 
narily known  as  his  description  of  Mona  Lisa  with  the 
exposure  of  James's  consciousness  which  is  ordinarily 
known  as  the  description  of  a  telegraph  operator  (In 
the  Cage). 

The  reduction  of  all  experience  to  the  aesthetic  level 


AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  JAMES      239 

James  himself  recognized  as  a  hazardous  adventure. 
At  the  conclusion  of  his  searching  criticism  of  a  fellow 
adventurer,  Gabriele  D'Annunzio,  he  raises  the  question 
whether  it  can  ever  hope  to  be  successful.  D'Anmmzio's 
adventure  he  pronounces  a  dismal  failure — that  is,  of 
course,  an  aesthetic  failure;  for  in  the  quest  of  the 
beauty  of  passion  the  Italian,  he  declares,  has  produced 
the  effect  of  a  box  of  monkeys,  or  as  he  periphrastically 
puts  it,  "  The  association  rising  before  us  more  nearly 
than  any  other  is  that  of  the  manners  observable  in  the 
most  mimetic  department  of  any  great  menagerie." 
But,  he  continues,  the  question  is  whether  D'Annunzio's 
case  is  "  the  only  case  of  the  kind  conceivable.  May  we 
not  suppose  another  with  the  elements  differently  mixed? 
May  we  not  in  imagination  alter  the  proportions  within 
or  the  influences  without,  and  look  with  cheerfulness  for 
a  different  issue.  Need  the  aesthetic  adventure,  in  a 
word,  organised  for  real  discovery,  give  us  no  more 
comforting  news  of  success?  .  .  .  To  which  probably 
the  sole  answer  is  that  no  man  can  say." 

The  last  sentence  is  modest  but  can  not  have  been 
wholly  sincere;  for  James  must  have  known  that  his 
own  works  answer  all  these  questions  in  the  affirmative. 
His  own  case  is  an  altogether  different  variety  of  the 
species ;  his  "  news  "  is  infinitely  more  comforting  than 
D'Annunzio's.  The  particular  ugliness,  the  morbid 
erotic  obsession,  on  which  D'Annunzio  foundered,  James, 
like  Pater,  sailed  serenely  by.  His  aesthetic  vision  had 
a  far  wider  range  and  a  far  higher  level  of  observation 
than  that  of  almost  any  of  the  Latin  votaries  of  "  art 
for  art " — Gautier  or  Flaubert,  for  example.  And  yet, 


240     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

let  us  admit  it  frankly  once  for  all,  his  representation 
of  life  offends  the  whole-souled  critical  sense  intensely 
in  some  particulars  and  on  what  is  fundamentally  the 
same  ground  as  that  on  which  these  others  offend  it. 
His  representation  of  life  is  an  aesthetic  flat;  it  sins 
against  the  diversity,  the  thick  rotundity,  the  integrity 
of  life.  Its  exquisitely  arranged  scenes  and  situations 
and  atmospheres  are  not  infrequently  "  ugly,"  as  he 
would  say,  with  the  absence  of  moral  energy  and  action. 
In  The  Awkward  Age,  for  example,  in  that  society 
which  lives  for  "  the  finer  things,"  which  perceives,  and 
compares,  and  consults,  and  so  perfectly  masters  its 
instincts,  the  situation  fairly  shouts  for  the  presence  of 
at  least  one  young  man  conceivably  capable  of  bursting 
like  Lochinvar  through  the  circle  of  intriguing  petti- 
coats to  carry  off  the  heroine.  The  atmosphere  of  The 
Golden  Bowl  is  ineffable — "  There  had  been,"  says  the 
author,  "  beauty  day  after  day,  and  there  had  been  for 
the  spiritual  lips  something  of  the  pervasive  taste  of  it." 
The  atmosphere  is  ineffably  rich,  still,  golden,  and,  in 
the  long  run,  stifling ;  the  perceptive  Mr.  Verver,  who  is 
in  it,  gives  a  superb  image  of  its  effect :  "  That's  all  I 
mean  at  any  rate — that  it's  'sort  of  soothing:  as  if 
we  were  sitting  about  on  divans,  with  pigtails,  smoking 
opium  and  seeing  visions.  '  Let  us  then  be  up  and 
doing  ' — what  is  it  Longfellow  says  ?  That  seems  some- 
times to  ring  out ;  like  the  police  breaking  in — into  our 
opium  den — to  give  us  a  shake." 

One  may  properly  stress  the  point  of  his  sin  against 
the  integrity  of  life  because  it  is  of  the  essence  of  the 
aesthetic  case.  It  explains  the  vague  but  profound 


AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  JAMES      241 

resentment  which  some  readers  who  do  not  balk  at 
James's  difficulty,  feel  when  they  have  got  "  inside." 
Mr.  Brownell,  Mr.  Hueffer,  and  Miss  West  all  point 
toward  but  do  not,  I  think,  quite  touch  the  heart  of  the 
matter  when  they  say  that  James  lacks  "  the  historic 
sense."  A  part  of  the  historic  sense  he  indubitably  has, 
and  far  more  historical  learning  is  implied  in  his  work 
than  is  explicit  in  it ;  he  loves  the  color  and  form  of  the 
past,  he  feels  the  "  beauties  "  of  history.  But  history 
to  him,  even  the  history  of  his  own  life,  is  a  kind  of  mag- 
nificent picture  gallery  through  which  he  strolls,  delight- 
edly commenting  on  the  styles  of  different  schools  and 
periods,  and  pausing  now  and  then  for  special  expres- 
sion of  rapture  before  a  masterpiece.  Miss  West  beau- 
tifully flames  with  indignation  at  his  "  jocular  "  refer- 
ences to  the  Franco-Prussian  War  and  at  his  unsympa- 
thetic treatment  of  the  French  Revolution  till  she  hits 
upon  the  explanation  that  he  was  out  of  Europe  while 
the  Franco-Prussian  War  raged,  and  that  he  was  not 
born  at  the  time  of  the  French  Revolution,  so  that  he 
could  no  more  speak  well  of  it  "  than  he  could  propose 
for  his  club  a  person  whom  he  had  never  met."  The 
explanation  doesn't  fit  all  the  facts.  He  was  not  out  of 
England  when  in  his  introduction  to  Rupert  Brooke's 
letters,  he  expressed  his  satisfaction  that  the  English 
tradition  "  should  have  flowered  in  a  specimen  so  beau- 
tifully producible."  The  appreciation  of  Brooke  is  one 
of  the  most  beautifully  passionate  tributes  ever  written ; 
but  the  passion  is  purely  aesthetic ;  the  inveterate  air 
of  the  connoisseur  viewing  a  new  picture  in  the  gallery 
of  masterpieces  he  can  not  shake  off.  He  was  not  speak- 


ing  of  events  that  took  place  before  he  was  born  when 
he  said  of  the  assassination  of  Lincoln  in  his  Notes  of 
a  Son  and  Brother:  "  The  collective  sense  of  what  had 
occurred  was  of  a  sadness  too  noble  not  somehow  to 
inspire,  and  it  was  truly  in  the  air  that,  whatever  we 
had  as  a  nation  failed  to  produce,  we  could  at  least 
gather  round  this  perfection  of  classic  woe.  True 
enough,  as  we  were  to  see,  the  immediate  harvest  of 
our  loss  was  almost  too  ugly  to  be  borne — for  nothing 
more  sharply  comes  back  to  me  than  the  tune  to  which 
the  esthetic  sense,  if  one  glanced  but  from  that  high 
window,  recoiled  in  dismay  from  the  sight  of  Mr.  Andrew 
Johnson  perched  on  the  stricken  scene." 

Any  good  American  will  flame  with  indignation  when 
he  reads  that  passage;  it  so  fails  to  present  the  subject; 
it  is  so  horribly  inadequate;  it  so  affronts  what  Lord 
Morley  would  call  "  the  high  moralities  "  of  life.  With 
its  stricken  "  scene,"  its  aesthetic  rapture,  its  aesthetic- 
dismay,  it  insults  the  moral  sense  as  a  man  would  in- 
sult it  who  should  ask  one  to  note  the  exquisite  slope 
of  a  woman's  neck  at  the  funeral  of  her  husband.  It 
makes  one  burn  to  break  the  glass  in  the  high  aesthetic 
window.  It  sins  against  the  integrity  of  life  as,  to  take 
some  distinguished  examples,  Kenan's  Vie  de  Jesus  and 
Pater's  Plato  and  Platonism  sin  against  it.  To  present 
the  Spartan  boy  as  a  nineteenth-century  aesthete  or  to 
present  the  life  of  Jesus  as  essentially  "  delicious  "  is 
to  miss  in  the  quest  of  distinction  the  most  vital  and 
obvious  of  distinctions.  It  is  a  blunder  into  which 
simple,  gross,  whole-souled  men  like  Fielding  or  Smollett 
or  Dickens  could  never  have  fallen.  It  is  a  crudity  of 


AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  JAMES      243 

which  only  the  most  exquisite  aesthete  is  capable;  and 
he  perching  exclusively  in  his  high  aesthetic  window 
absolutely  can  not  avoid  it.  It  is  of  the  pure  aesthetic 
consciousness,  not  the  intellect,  that  Emerson  should 
have  written  his  terse  little  couplet : 

Gravely  it  broods  apart  on  joy 
And  truth  to  tell,  amused  by  pain. 

When  all  these  discriminations  against  the  usurpa- 
tions and  blindnesses  of  the  aesthetic  sense  have  been 
made  it  remains  to  be  said  that  the  infinitely  seductive, 
the  endlessly  stimulating  virtue  of  Henry  James  is  the 
quintessential  refinement,  the  intriguing  complexity, 
the  white-hot  ardor  of  his  passion  for  beauty.  One  feels 
the  sacred  flame  most  keenly,  perhaps,  in  novels  and 
tales  like  The  Figure  in  the  Carpet,  The  Next  Time, 
The  Death  of  the  Lion,  The  Lesson  of  the  Master, 
Roderick  Hudson,  and  The  Tragic  Muse,  in  all  of  which 
he  is  interpreting  the  spirit  of  the  artist  or  treating 
the  conflict  between  the  world  and  art.  One  feels  it  in 
the  words  of  the  young  man  in  The  Tragic  Muse  who 
abandons  the  prospect  of  a  brilliant  political  career  to 
become  a  portrait  painter :  "  The  cleanness  and  quiet- 
ness of  it,  the  independent  effort  to  do  something,  to 
leave  something  which  shall  give  joy  to  man  long  after 
the  howling  has  died  away  to  the  last  ghost  of  an  echo — 
such  a  vision  solicits  me  in  the  watches  of  the  night  with 
an  almost  irresistible  force."  One  feels  it  in  the  words 
of  the  young  diplomat  in  the  same  novel,  who  is  infatu- 
ated with  a  fine  piece  of  acting:  "He  floated  in  the 
felicity  of  it,  in  the  general  encouragement  of  a  sense 


244     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

of  the  perfectly  done"  One  feels  it  in  the  words  of  the 
novelist  in  The  Lesson  of  the  Master,  who  says  he  has 
missed  "  the  great  thing  " — namely,  "  the  sense  which 
is  the  real  life  of  the  artist  and  the  absence  of  which  is 
his  death,  of  having  drawn  from  his  intellectual  instru- 
ment the  finest  music  that  nature  had  hidden  in  it,  of 
having  played  it  as  it  should  be  played." 

For  a  born  man  of  letters  the  first  effect  of  this  pas- 
sion for  perfection  is  an  immense  solicitude  for  style, 
that  is  to  say,  for  an  exact  verbal  and  rhythmical  cor- 
respondence between  his  conception  of  beauty  and  his 
representation  of  it.  Judgment  upon  style,  then,  in- 
volves two  distinct  points:  first,  the  question  whether 
the  conception  is  beautiful,  and,  secondly,  the  question 
whether  the  representation  is  exact.  In  the  case  of 
Henry  James  there  should  not  be  much  dispute  about 
the  exactness  and  completeness  of  the  representation; 
no  man  ever  strove  more  remorselessly  or  on  the  whole 
more  successfully  to  reproduce  the  shape  and  color  and 
movement  of  his  aesthetic  experience.  The  open  ques- 
tion is  whether  his  conceptions  were  beautiful;  and  on 
this  point  the  majority  of  his  critics  have  agreed  that 
his  earlier  conceptions  were  beautiful  but  that  his  later 
conceptions  were  not.  To  that,  in  the  last  analysis,  one 
must  reduce  the  famous  discussion  of  his  two,  or  three, 
or  half-a-dozen  "  styles."  Any  one  who  reads  the 
works  through  in  chronological  order  can  explode  to  his 
own  satisfaction  the  notion  that  James  in  any  book  or 
year  or  decade  deliberately  changed  his  style.  What 
changed  was  his  conception  of  beauty,  and  that  changed 
by  an  entirely  gradual  multiplication  of  distinctions 


AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  JAMES      245 

through  the  enrichment  of  his  consciousness  and  the 
intensification  of  his  vision.  To  his  youthful  eye  beauty 
appeared  in  clear  light,  clear  color,  sharp  outline,  solid 
substance;  accordingly  the  work  of  his  earlier  period 
abounds  in  figures  distinct  as  in  an  etching  of  the  eight- 
eenth century,  grouping  themselves  as  on  a  canvas  of 
Gainsborough's,  and  conversing  and  interacting  with 
the  brilliant  lucidity  and  directness  of  persons  in  a 
comedy  of  Congreve's.  To  his  maturer  vision  beauty 
has  less  of  body  and  more  of  soul;  it  is  not  so  much  in 
things  as  in  the  illimitable  effluence  and  indefinable  aura 
of  things ;  it  reveals  itself  less  to  eye  and  ear  and  hand — 
though  these  are  its  avenues  of  approach — than  to 
some  mysterious  inner  organ  which  it  moves  to  a  divine 
abstraction  from  sense,  to  an  ecstacy  of  pure  contem- 
plation. Accordingly,  late  works  like  The  Sacred  Fount 
and  The  Golden  Bowl  present  rather  presences  than 
persons,  dim  Maeterlinckian  presences  gliding  through 
the  shadow  and  shimmer  of  Turneresque  landscapes  and 
Maeterlinckian  country-houses,  and  rarely  saying  or 
doing  anything  whatever  of  significance  to  vulgar  ear 
or  eye.  The  evolution  of  his  artistic  interest  may  be 
summed  up  in  this  way:  he  begins  with  an  interest  in 
the  seen,  the  said,  the  enacted ;  and  he  ends  by  regarding 
all  that  as  an  obstruction  in  the  way  of  his  latest  inter- 
est, namely,  the  presentation  of  the  unseen,  the  unsaid, 
the  unacted — the  vast  quantity  of  mental  life  in  highly 
civilized  beings  which  makes  no  outward  sign,  the  in- 
visible drama  upon  which  most  of  his  predecessors  had 
hardly  raised  the  curtain.  The  difficulty  in  the  later 
works  is  not  primarily  in  the  sentence  structure  but  in 


246     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

the  point  of  view.  The  sentences  in  the  most  difficult 
of  the  novels,  The  Sacred  Fount,  are  generally  as  neat, 
terse,  and  alert  as  the  sentences  in  The  Europeans, 
which  is  within  the  comprehension  of  an  intelligent 
child.  When  his  sentences  are  long  and  intricate  they 
usually  imprison  and  precisely  render  some  intricate  and 
rewarding  beauty  of  a  moment  of  consciousness  luxuri- 
ously full:  for  example  this  moment  of  Strether's  in 
The  Ambassadors: 

How  could  he  wish  it  to  be  lucid  for  others,  for  any  one, 
that  he,  for  the  hour,  saw  reasons  enough  in  the  mere  way 
the  bright,  clean,  ordered  water-side  life  came  in  at  the  open 
window? — the  mere  way  Mme.  de  Vionnet,  opposite  him 
over  their  intensely  white  table-linen,  their  omelette  aux 
tomates,  their  bottle  of  straw-colored  chablis,  thanked  him 
for  everything  almost  with  the  smile  of  a  child,  while  her 
gray  eyes  moved  in  and  out  of  their  talk,  back  to  the  quarter 
of  the  warm  spring  air,  in  which  early  summer  had  already 
begun  to  throb,  and  then  back  to  his  face  and  their  human 
questions. 

Only  attend  till  the  beauty  of  that  crowded  moment 
reproduces  itself  in  your  consciousness,  and  you  will 
not  complain  much  of  the  difficult  magic  of  its  evocation. 

Beyond  almost  all  the  English  novelists  of  his  time 
Henry  James  has  applied  his  passion  for  beauty  to  the 
total  form  and  composition  of  his  stories.  He  cares  little 
for  the  "  slice  of  life,"  the  loose  episodic  novel,  the 
baggy  autobiographical  novel,  so  much  in  vogue  of  late, 
into  which  the  author  attempts  to  pitch  the  whole  of 
contemporary  life  and  to  tell  annually  all  that  he  knows 
and  feels  up  to  the  date  of  publication  without  other 


AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  JAMES      247 

visible  principle  of  selection.  With  extremely  few  excep- 
tions his  subjects  present  themselves  to  him  either  as 
"  pictures  "  to  be  kept  rigorously  within  the  limits  of  a 
frame,  or  as  "  dramas  "  to  be  kept  within  the  limits  of 
a  stage,  or  as  alternations  of  "  drama  "  with  "  picture." 
How  he  imposes  upon  himself  the  laws  of  painter  and 
playwright,  how  he  chooses  his  "  centre  of  composition," 
handles  his  "perspective,"  accumulates  his  "  values," 
turns  on  the  "  lights  " — all  this  he  has  told  with  extraor- 
dinary gusto  in  those  prefaces  which  more  illuminate  the 
fine  art  of  fiction  than  anything  else — one  is  tempted  to 
say,  than  everything  else — on  the  subject.  The  point 
for  us  here  is  that  he  strives  to  make  the  chosen  form 
and  the  intended  effect  govern  with  an  "  exquisite  econ- 
omy "  every  admitted  detail.  The  ideal  is  to  express 
everything  that  belongs  in  the  "  picture,"  everything 
that  is  in  the  relations  of  the  persons  of  the  drama,  but 
nothing  else. 

His  exacting  aesthetic  sense  determines  the  field  no 
less  than  the  form  of  his  fiction.  A  quite  definite  social 
ideal  conceived  in  the  aesthetic  consciousness  is  implicit 
in  his  representation  of  a  really  idle  class — an  ideal 
ultimately  traceable  to  his  own  upbringing  and  to  his 
early  contact  with  the  Emersonian  rather  than  the 
Carlylean  form  of  transcendentalism.  He  has  a  positive 
distaste  for  our  contemporary  hero — "  the  man  who 
does  things  " ;  the  summum  bonum  for  him  is  not  an 
action  but  a  state  of  being — an  untroubled  awareness  of 
beauty.  Hence  his  manifested  predilection  for  "  highly 
civilized  young  Americans,  born  to  an  easy  fortune  and 
a  tranquil  destiny " ;  for  artists  who  amateurishly 


24-8  ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

sketch  and  loiter  through  lovely  Italian  springs,  though 
conscious  of  "  social  duties  "  that  await  them  beyond 
the  Alps  ;  for  diplomats  devoted  to  the  theatre  and  mem- 
bers of  Parliament  who  dabble  in  paint;  for  Italian 
princesses  and  princes  free  from  the  cares  of  state ;  for 
French  counts  and  countesses  who  have  nothing  to  keep 
up  but  the  traditions  of  their  "  race  " ;  for  English  lords 
with  no  occupation  but  the  quest  of  a  lady ;  for  Amer- 
ican millionaires  who  have  left  "  trade  "  three  thousand 
miles  behind  them  to  collect  impressions,  curios,  and 
sons-in-law  in  Europe.  Objectors  may  justly  complain 
that  he  seems  unable  to  conceive  of  a  really  fine  lady 
or  a  really  fine  gentleman  or  a  really  decent  marriage 
without  a  more  or  less  huge  fortune  in  the  background 
or  in  the  foreground  of  the  picture ;  and  it  may  be  added 
that  to  the  sense  of  a  truly  "  Emersonian  "  mind  the 
clink  and  consideration  of  gold  in  most  of  his  crucial 
instances  is  a  harsh  and  profound  note  of  vulgarity 
vibrating  through  his  noble  society.  He  is  entirely 
sincere  when  he  says,  in  speaking  of  Balzac,  that  the 
object  of  money  is  to  enable  one  to  forget  it.  Yet  fine 
ladies,  fine  gentlemen,  and  fine  society  as  he  understands 
these  matters  are,  to  tell  the  hard  truth,  impossible 
except  in  the  conditions  created  by  affluence  and  leisure. 
In  comparative  poverty  one  may  be  good;  but  one  can 
not,  in  the  Jamesian  sense,  be  beautiful ! 

Society  can  not  in  the  Jamesian  sense  be  beautiful 
till  the  pressures  of  untoward  physical  circumstances, 
of  physical  needs,  and  of  engagements  with  "  active 
life  "  are  removed,  and  men  and  women  are  free  to  live 
"  from  within  outward,"  subjecting  themselves  only  to 


AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  JAMES       249 

the  environment  and  entering  only  the  relationships  dic- 
tated by  the  aesthetic  sense.  Let  us  not  undervalue  the 
significance  of  this  ideal,  either  with  reference  to  life 
or  with  reference  to  literature.  It  is  inadequate ;  but  it 
has  the  high  merit  of  being  finely  human.  It  had  the 
precious  virtue  of  utterly  delivering  Henry  James  from 
the  riotous  and  unclean  hands  of  the  "  naturalists." 
To  it  he  owes  the  splendid  distinction  that  when  half 
the  novelists  of  Europe,  carried  off  their  feet  by  the  nat- 
uralistic drift  of  the  age,  began  to  go  a-slumming  in  the 
muck  and  mire  of  civilization,  to  explore  man's  simian 
relationships,  to  exploit  la  bete  humaine  and  Vhomme 
moyen  sensuel,  to  prove  the  ineluctability  of  flesh  and 
fate  and  instinct  and  environment — he,  with  aristocratic 
contempt  of  them  and  their  formulas  and  their  works, 
withdrew  farther  and  farther  from  them,  drew  proudly 
out  of  the  drift  of  the  age,  and  set  his  imagination  the 
task  of  presenting  the  fairest  specimens  of  humanity  in 
a  choice  sifted  society  tremendously  disciplined  by  its 
own  ideals  but  generally  liberated  from  all  other  com- 
pelling forces.  Precisely  because  he  keeps  mere  car- 
nality out  of  his  picture,  holds  passion  rigorously 
under  stress,  presents  the  interior  of  a  refined  conscious- 
ness— precisely  for  these  reasons  he  can  produce  a  more 
intense  pleasure  in  the  reader  by  the  representation  of  a 
momentary  gush  of  tears  or  a  single  swift  embrace  than 
most  of  our  contemporaries  can  produce  with  chapter 
after  chapter  of  storms  and  seductions. 

The  controlling  principle  in  Henry  James's  imaginary 
world  is  neither  religion  nor  morality  nor  physical  neces- 
sity nor  physical  instinct.  The  controlling  principle  is 


250     ON  CONTEMP ORARY  LITERATURE 

a  sense  of  style,  under  which  vice,  to  adapt  Burke's 
words,  loses  half  its  evil  by  losing  all  its  grossness.  In 
the  noble  society  noblesse,  and  nothing  else,  obliges. 
Even  in  the  early  "  international "  novels  we  witness 
the  transformation  of  Puritan  morality,  of  which  the 
sanction  was  religious,  into  a  kind  of  chivalry,  of  which 
the  sanctions  are  individual  taste  and  class  loyalty. 
Madame  de  Mauve,  the  lovely  American  married  to  a 
naughty  French  husband  in  that  charming  little  master- 
piece which  bears  her  name,  is  not  exhibited  as  preserv- 
ing her  "  virtue  "  when  she  rejects  her  lover;  she  is  ex- 
hibited as  preserving  her  fineness.  Her  American  lover 
acquiesces  in  his  dismissal  not  from  any  sudden  pang 
of  conscience  but  from  a  sudden  recognition  that  if  he 
persists  in  his  suit  he  will  be  doing  precisely  what  the 
vulgar  French  world  and  one  vulgar  spectator  in  par- 
ticular expect  him  to  do.  In  the  earlier  novels  such  as 
Madame  de  Mauve,  Daisy  Miller,  and  The  American, 
the  straightness,  the  innocence,  the  firmness  of  the 
American  conscience  are  rather  played  up  as  beauties 
against  the  European  background.  Yet  as  early  as 
1878  he  had  begun,  with  the  delightfully  vivacious  and 
witty  Europeans,  his  criticism  of  the  intellectual  dulness 
and  emotional  poverty  of  the  New  England  sense  of 
"  righteousness  " — a  criticism  wonderfully  culminating 
in  The  Ambassadors,  1903,  in  which  the  highly  percep- 
tive Strether,  sent  to  France  to  reclaim  an  erring  son 
of  New  England,  is  himself  converted  to  the  European 
point  of  view. 

Noblesse  in  the  later  novels  inspires  beauties  of  be- 
havior beyond  the  reaches  of  the  Puritan  imagination. 


AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  JAMES      251 

It  is  astonishing  to  observe  how  many  heroes  and  hero- 
ines of  the  later  period  are  called  upon  to  attest  their 
fineness  by  a  firm  clear-eyed  mendacity.  The  Wings  of 
a  Dove,  for  example,  is  a  vast  conspiracy  of  silence  to 
keep  a  girl  who  knows  she  is  dying  from  knowing  that 
her  friends  know  that  she  knows.  To  lie  with  a  wry 
face  is  a  blemish  on  one's  character.  "  /  lie  well,  thank 
God,"  says  Mrs.  Lowder,  "  when,  as  sometimes  will  hap- 
pen, there's  nothing  else  so  good."  In  the  same  novel 
poor  Densher,  who  rather  hates  lying,  rises  to  it :  "  The 
single  thing  that  was  clear  in  complications  was  that, 
whatever  happened,  one  was  to  behave  as  a  gentleman — 
to  which  was  added  indeed  the  perhaps  slightly  less  shin- 
ing truth  that  complications  might  sometimes  have  their 
tedium  beguiled  by  a  study  of  the  question  of  how  a 
gentleman  should  behave."  When  he  is  tempted  to  throw 
up  his  adventure  in  noble  mendacity  he  is  held  to  it  in 
this  way :  as  soon  as  he  steps  into  the  Palazzo  Leporelli 
in  Venice  where  the  dying  lady  resides  he  sees  "  all  the 
elements  of  the  business  compose,  as  painters  called  it, 
differently  " — he  sees  himself  as  a  figure  in  a  Veronese 
picture  and  he  lives  up  to  the  grand  style  of  the  picture. 
He  actively  fosters  the  "  suppressions  "  which  are  "  in 
the  direct  interest  of  every  one's  good  manners,  every 
one's  really  quite  generous  ideal." 

The  most  elaborate  and  subtle  of  all  James's  trib- 
utes to  the  aesthetic  ideal  in  conduct  is  The  Golden 
Bowl — a  picture  in  eight  hundred  pages  of  the  relations 
existing  between  Maggie  Verver  and  her  husband  the 
Prince,  between  Maggie's  father  Adam  Verver  and  his 
second  wife  Charlotte,  and  between  each  one  of  the 


252     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

quadrangle  and  all  the  rest.  Before  the  pair  of  mar- 
riages took  place  we  are  made  to  understand  that  an 
undefinedly  intimate  relation  had  existed  between  the 
Prince  and  Charlotte,  of  which  Maggie  and  her  father 
were  unaware;  and  after  the  marriages  we  are  made  to 
understand  that  the  undefinedly  intimate  relation  was 
resumed.  All  four  of  the  parties  to  this  complex  rela- 
tionship are  thoroughly  civilized ;  they  are  persons  fit 
for  the  highest  society :  that  is  to  say,  they  have  wealth, 
beauty,  exquisite  taste,  and  ability  to  tell  a  lie  with  a 
straight  face.  What  will  be  the  outcome?  The  out- 
come is  that  without  overt  act,  or  plain  speech,  or  dis- 
played temper  on  any  hand,  each  one  by  psychic  tact 
divines  "  everything,"  and  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Verver  quietly 
return  to  America.  Why  is  the  liaison  dissolved  with 
such  celestial  decorum?  It  is  dissolved,  because  the 
"  principals "  in  it  perceive  the  aesthetic  "  impossi- 
bility "  of  continuing  their  relations  in  that  atmosphere 
of  silent  but  lucid  "  awareness  " ;  and  it  is  dissolved 
with  decorum  because  all  the  persons  concerned  are 
infinitely  superior  to  the  vulgarity  of  rows,  ruptures, 
and  public  proceedings.  The  "  criticism  of  life  "  im- 
plicit in  the  entire  novel  becomes  superbly  explicit  in 
Maggie's  vision  of  the  ugliness  and  barbarousness  of  the 
behavior  of  ordinary  mortals  in  like  circumstances : 

She  might  fairly,  as  she  watched  them,  have  missed  it 
(hot  angry  jealousy)  as  a  lost  thing;  have  yearned  for  it, 
for  the  straight  vindictive  view,  the  rights  of  resentment, 
the  rages  of  jealousy,  the  protests  of  passion,  as  for  some- 
thing she  had  been  cheated  of  not  least:  a  range  of  feelings 
which  for  many  women  would  have  meant  so  much,  but 


AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  JAMES      253 

which  for  her  husband's  wife,  for  her  father's  daughter, 
figured  nothing  nearer  to  experience  than  a  wild  eastern 
caravan,  looming  into  view  with  crude  colours  in  the  sun, 
fierce  pipes  in  the  air,  high  spears  against  the  sky,  all  a 
thrill,  a  natural  joy  to  mingle  with,  but  turning  off  short 
before  it  reached  her  and  plunging  into  other  defiles. 

Does  not  that  description  of  Maggie's  vision  throb 
with  a  fine  passion  of  its  own — throb  with  the  excite- 
ment of  James's  imaginative  insight  into  the  possible 
amenity  of  human  intercourse  in  a  society  aesthetically 
disciplined  and  controlled? 

James's  works  throb  with  that  fine  passion  from  the 
beginning  to  the  end — just  as  Pater's  do.  Criticism's 
favorite  epithets  for  him  hitherto  have  been  "  cold," 
"  analytical,"  "  scientific,"  "  passionless,"  "  pitiless  " 
historian  of  the  manners  of  a  futile  society.  That  view 
of  him  is  doomed  to  disappear  before  the  closer  scrutiny 
which  he  demanded  and  which  he  deserves.  He  is  not 
an  historian  of  manners ;  he  is  a  trenchant  idealistic 
critic  of  life  from  the  aesthetic  point  of  view. 

He  is  not  pitiless  except  in  his  exposure  of  the 
"  ugly,"  which  to  his  sense  includes  all  forms  of  evil ; 
in  that  task  he  is  remorseless  whether  he  is  exposing  the 
ugliness  of  American  journalism  as  in  The  Reverberator, 
or  the  ugliness  of  a  thin  nervous  hysterical  intellectual- 
ism  and  feminism  as  in  The  Bostonians,  or  the  ugliness  of 
murder  as  in  The  Other  House,  or  the  ugliness  of  irregu- 
lar sexual  relations  as  in  What  Maisie  Knew,  or  the  ugli- 
ness of  corrupted  childhood  as  in  The  Turn  of  the 
Screw.  The  deep-going  uglinesses  in  the  last  three  cases 
are  presented  with  a  superlative  intenseness  of  artistic 


254     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

passion.  If  the  effect  is  not  thrilling  in  the  first  case 
and  heart-rending  in  the  last  two,  it  is  because  Anglo- 
Saxons  are  quite  unaccustomed  to  having  their  deeps  of 
terror  and  pity,  their  moral  centers,  touched  through 
the  aesthetic  nerves.  Granting  the  fact,  there  is  no 
reason  why  they  should  deny  the  presence  of  a  passion 
of  antipathy  in  a  man  to  whose  singular  consciousness 
the  objectionable  inveterately  takes  the  shape  of  the 


What,  however,  is  more  incomprehensible  is  the  gen- 
eral failure  of  criticism  to  recognize  the  ardor  of  his 
quite  unscientific  attachment  to  the  beautiful.  His 
alleged  deficiency  in  charm,  it  is  asserted,  is  due  to  the 
fact  that  he  does  not  sympathize  with  or  love  any  of  his 
characters.  The  alleged  fact  is  not  a  fact.  He  sympa- 
thizes intensely  with  all  his  artists  and  novelists,  with 
all  his  connoisseurs  of  life,  with  all  his  multitude  of 
miraculously  perceptive  persons  from  the  American 
homesick  for  England  in  the  Passionate  Pilgrim  through 
the  young  woman  aware  of  the  fineness  of  old  furniture 
in  The  Spoils  of  Poynton  to  Maggie  and  Mr.  Verver  in 
The  Golden  Bowl.  And  he  dotes,  devoutly  dotes,  dotes 
in  idolatry  upon  the  enriched  consciousness,  the  general 
awareness,  and  the  physical  loveliness  of  his  women. 
He  can  not  abide  a  plain  heroine,  even  if  she  is  to  be  a 
criminal.  Of  Rose,  the  murderess  in  The  Other  House, 
he  says  the  most  exquisite  things  —  "  She  carries  the 
years  almost  as  you  do,  and  her  head  better  than  any 
young  woman  I've  ever  seen.  Life  is  somehow  becoming 
to  her."  In  almost  every  novel  that  he  wrote  he  touched 
some  woman  or  other  with  the  soft  breath  of  pure  aes- 


AESTHETIC  IDEALISM  OF  JAMES      255 

thetic  adoration, — a  refining  and  exalting  emotion  which 
is  the  note  of  Sherringham's  relation  to  Miriam  in  The 
Tragic  Muse: 

Beauty  was  the  principle  of  everything  she  did.  .  .  . 
He  could  but  call  it  a  felicity  and  an  importance  incalcul- 
able, and  but  know  that  it  connected  itself  with  universal 
values.  To  see  this  force  in  operation,  to  sit  within  its 
radius  and  feel  it  shift  and  revolve  and  change  and  never 
fail,  was  a  corrective  to  the  depression,  the  humiliation,  the 
bewilderment  of  life.  It  transported  our  troubled  friend 
from  the  vulgar  hour  and  the  ugly  fact;  drew  him  to  some- 
thing that  had  no  warrant  but  its  sweetness,  no  name  nor 
place  save  as  the  pure,  the  remote,  the  antique. 

This  is  the  "  very  ecstasy  of  love  " ;  and  for  this 
virtue,  in  the  years  to  come,  one  adept  after  another 
reading  the  thirty  or  forty  volumes  of  James  which  any 
one  can  read  with  ease  and  the  fifteen  or  twenty  richer 
volumes  which  demand  closer  application — for  this  vir- 
tue one  adept  after  another,  till  a  brave  company 
gathers,  is  certain  to  say,  "  I  discriminate ;  but  I  adore 
him!" 


X 

THE  HUMANISM  OF  GEORGE  MEREDITH 

THE  refusal  of  the  authorities  of  Westminster  Abbey 
to  allow  George  Meredith  to  sleep  among  England's 
half-canonized  dead  was  by  no  means  surprising.  In 
spite  of  the  indorsement  of  the  Society  of  \uthors  and 
the  Prime  Minister,  the  future  of  his  reputation  still 
remains  somewhat  problematic.  If  he  had  died  twenty- 
five  years  ago,  though  the  work  on  which  his  fame  rests 
had  then  been  accomplished,  it  is  doubtful  whether  the 
general  voice  would  have  decreed  him  this  solemn  tribute. 
Indeed,  from  his  first  appearance  in  literature  down  to 
the  time  of  his  death  no  writer  of  his  power  had  received 
less  recognition  for  his  virtues  or  more  persistent  praise 
for  his  faults.  George  Eliot,  Swinburne,  Watts- 
Dunton,  and  a  following  of  enthusiasts  felt  his  might, 
and  for  the  most  part  tried  to  persuade  the  world  that 
he  was  a  great  literary  artist.  Others  asserted  with 
equal  vehemence  that  he  was  an  incoherent  thinker,  mak- 
ing his  artificial,  choked,  and  stuttering  novels  the 
vehicle  for  a  mass  of  epigram.  The  so-called  man  in 
the  street,  if  he  chanced  to  overhear  the  discussion, 
promptly  decided  that  it  did  not  concern  him,  either 
way.  If  Meredith  attended  to  the  early  notices  of  his 
books,  he  must  often  have  sighed,  as  one  who  watches 
for  the  morning.  Even  so  late  as  1880  the  Westminster 

256 


HUMANISM  OF  GEORGE  MEREDITH     257 

Review,  traditionally  favorable  to  his  reputation,  com- 
mented upon  the  recently  published  Egoist — now  often 
considered  his  weightiest  contribution  to  fiction — as 
follows : 

Mr.  Meredith  is,  perhaps,  our  most  artistic  novelist,  and, 
for  that  very  reason,  by  no  means  popular  with  mere  sub- 
scribers to  Mudie's.  His  audience  is  few,  but  fit.  ...  He 
is,  in  a  word,  what  the  world  would  vulgarly  call  too  clever. 
.  .  .  This  is  Mr.  Meredith's  great  fault — he  overdoes  his 
cleverness.  If  he  was  more  simple,  he  would  be  far  more 
effective.  The  Egotist  is  full  of  poetry,  subtle  observation, 
and  sparkling  epigram. 

This  review,  with  its  emphasis  upon  the  literary 
artist,  is  typical,  and,  unless  I  am  mistaken,  is  about 
the  quintessence  of  bad  criticism.  For  it  has  yet  to  be 
demonstrated  that  perfection  of  art  has  interfered  with 
the  success  of  any  matter  whatsoever,  even  among  the 
subscribers  to  Mudie's.  Those  who  value  Meredith's 
work  most  wisely  will  not  extol  him  for  his  artistry,  but 
rather  deplore  his  lack  of  it  as  one  of  the  many  obstacles 
that  have  stood  in  the  way  of  his  popularity.  Further- 
more, to  say  that  he  "  overdoes  his  cleverness  "  is  to 
suggest  that  he  consciously  strains  for  effect.  If  this 
critic  had  really  been  one  of  that  fit  audience,  though 
few,  he  would  rather  have  suggested  that  it  was  in- 
superably difficult  for  Meredith  not  to  be  clever,  that 
it  was  almost  impossible  for  him  to  be  simple,  that  it  was 
entirely  regrettable  that  he  did  not  receive  a  stiff  Eng- 
lish academic  training.  How  might  not  the  Oxford 
culture  have  disciplined  his  Celtic  lawlessness  and  have 
subdued  his  turn  for  "  natural  magic  " !  Welsh  and 


258     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

Irish  in  ancestry,  Meredith  was  educated  at  a  Moravian 
school  in  Germany.  In  the  plastic  time  of  his  youth, 
he,  like  Browning  and  Carlyle,  was  his  own  master  of 
rhetoric.  Like  Carlyle,  he  wrote  prose  as  if  Dryden  had 
never  shown  the  superiority  of  Charles  the  Second's 
English  to  the  flowered  and  conceited  exuberance  of  the 
Elizabethans.  Like  Browning,  he  wrote  verse  as  if  Pope 
had  not  died  to  save  us  from  the  sins  of  the  metaphysical 
school.  If  Donne,  as  honest  Ben  declared,  for  not  keep- 
ing of  accents  deserved  hanging,  so  occasionally  did 
Meredith;  and  so  did  Meredith  frequently  for  wanton 
violations  of  English  idiom  and  barbarous  disregard  of 
the  decencies  of  English  style.  He  lacked  the  continence 
of  perfect  art.  He  was  not  steadily  master  of  the  means 
of  imparting  his  experience  to  the  reader  and  producing 
the  effects  which  he  desired  to  produce. 

He  was  not  wanting  in  a  perception  of  the  supreme 
beauty  of  style  which  appears  when  a  clear  conception 
is  perfectly  transmitted.  His  critical  sense  was  sound; 
he  knew  where  to  send  other  men  for  light.  To  a  corre- 
spondent who  had  asked  him  to  name  the  writers  most 
characteristic  of  the  genius  of  France  he  replied :  "  For 
human  philosophy,  Montaigne;  for  the  comic  apprecia- 
tion of  society,  Moliere ;  for  the  observation  of  life  and 
condensed  expression,  La  Bruyere;  for  a  most  delicate 
irony  scarcely  distinguishable  from  tenderness,  Renan; 
for  high  pitch  of  impassioned  sentiment,  Racine.  Add 
to  these  your  innumerable  writers  of  Memoirs  and 
Pense"es,  in  which  France  has  never  had  a  rival."  To 
another  correspondent  he  wrote  with  notable  disparage- 
ment of  English  models :  "  Style  is  rarely  achieved 


HUMANISM  OF  GEORGE  MEREDITH     259 

here.  Your  literary  hero,  lecturing  on  Style,  may  have 
a  different  opinion.  The  prose  in  Shakespeare  and 
Congreve  is  perfect.  They  have  always  the  right  accent 
on  their  terminations.  Apart  from  drama,  Swift  is  a 
great  exemplar;  Bolingbroke,  and  in  his  mild  tea-table 
way,  Addison,  follow.  Johnson  and  Macaulay  wielded 
bludgeons ;  they  had  not  the  strength  that  can  be  supple. 
Gibbon  could  take  a  long  stride  with  the  leg  of  a  danc- 
ing master ;  he  could  not  take  a  short  one."  In  his  essay 
on  the  "  Idea  of  Comedy "  he  showed  the  keenest 
appreciation  of  the  styles  of  Menander  and  Terence, 
writing  with  rapture  of  their  "  Elysian  speech,  equable 
and  ever  gracious."  But  two  years  later,  in  the  prelude 
to  the  Egoist,  he  was  capable  of  such  fantastic  sentences 
as  this: 

Who,  says  the  notable  humorist,  in  allusion  to  this  book 
(Book  of  Earth),  who  can  studiously  travel  through  sheets 
of  leaves,  now  capable  of  a  stretch  from  the  Lizard  to  the 
last  few  pulmonary  snips  and  shreds  of  leagues  dancing  on 
their  toes  for  cold,  explorers  tell  us,  and  catching  breath 
by  good  luck,  like  dogs  on  a  table,  on  the  edge  of  the  Pole? 

Judged  with  reference  to  such  standards  as  are 
offered  by  Henry  Esmond  or  The  Return  of  the  Native, 
he  wanted  art  no  less  as  a  story-teller  than  as  a  stylist. 
It  is  true  that  he  undertook  the  novelist's  most  difficult 
task.  In  his  work  the  narration  of  events  is  quite  sec- 
ondary to  the  disclosure  of  character.  His  representa- 
tion of  men  and  women  was  designed  to  reveal  the  secret 
springs  of  conduct  in  speech  and  art.  Sometimes,  like 
the  messenger  of  the  Senecan  tragedy,  he  reports  the 
great  things  that  are  going  on  behind  the  scenes  when 


260     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

our  English  sense  clamors  for  dramatic  representation. 
Sometimes  with  a  kind  of  choric  fury  he  drowns  the 
voices  of  the  actors  and  assaults  the  ears  of  the  audi- 
ence with  a  prolonged  and  partly  enigmatic  commentary. 
Sometimes  he  translates  the  conversation  of  hero  and 
heroine  into  a  condensed  telegraphic  Meredithese.  These 
methods  of  telling  a  story  are  inartistic  because  they 
do  not  effectively  convey  to  the  reader  the  mental  and 
emotional  experience  which  the  author  has  enjoyed; 
because  they  defraud  him  in  the  critical  moment  of  the 
legitimate  and  expected  pleasure  of  hearing  the  ipsissima 
verba  and  of  seeing  the  decisive  gesture  with  his  own 
eyes.  Defenders  of  Meredith  will  say  that  he  was  bent 
on  our  perceiving  the  finer  meanings  of  act  and  speech, 
and  that  he  could  be  sure  of  his  purpose  by  no  other 
methods.  That  is  to  confess  that  he  lacked  the  skill  of 
the  supreme  literary  artist,  that  his  intention  was 
greater  than  his  power,  that  his  vehicle  was  inadequate 
to  its  burden.  He  had  himself  a  subtle  sense  of  the 
deeper  implications  of  speech,  but  he  did  not  possess 
sovereignly  that  instinct  which  finds  a  single  word,  to 
tell  all.  When  Romeo  is  banished  from  Verona,  the 
nurse  urges  Juliet  to  marry  Paris.  Then  follows  this 
dialogue : 

Jul.  Speak'st  them  from  thy  heart? 

Nurse.  And  from  my  soul,  too;  else  beshrew  them  both. 

Jul.  Amen! 

Nurse.  What? 

Jul.  Well,  thou  hast  comforted  me  marvellous  much. 

Go  in ;  and  tell  my  lady  I  am  gone, 

Having  displeas'd  my  father,  to  Laurence's  cell 

To  make  confession  and  to  be  absolv'd. 


HUMANISM  OF  GEORGE  MEREDITH     261 

What  more  can  one  desire?  Could  forty  pages  of 
commentary  add  anything  to  that  one  incomparable 
Amen?  That  is  what  the  literary  artist  does  with  con- 
versation. Shakespeare's  plays  are  sown  with  such 
volume-speaking  words;  in  Meredith's  novels  I  do  not 
know  where  you  will  find  anything  approaching  it.  Too 
often  in  Meredith  there  is  volubility  where  in  Shake- 
speare silence  is  the  orator. 

If  Meredith  was  not  a  supreme  literary  artist,  is  it 
possible  that  he  was  a  first-rate  literary  genius ;  or  are 
the  two  things  inseparable?  It  would  be  gratifying  to 
find  some  substantial  ground  for  the  apparently  extrava- 
gant claims  of  his  friends.  One  of  them,  Robert  Louis 
Stevenson,  has  been  charged  with  uncritically  juxta- 
posing Meredith  and  Shakespeare  in  the  enthusiasm  of 
his  admiration  for  Rhoda  Fleming.  Looking  through 
Stevenson's  letters,  however,  I  have  been  pleased  to 
observe  that  he  says  very  little  about  Meredith  as  a 
literary  artist.  In  Sidney  Colvin's  two-volume  edition 
under  the  date  of  1879,  when  The  Egoist  was  published, 
there  is  a  single  reference  to  Meredith,  as  follows: 
"  Chapters  viii  and  ix  of  Meredith's  story  are  very  good, 
I  think."  That  is  all — and  he  had  met  the  author  in 
1878,  and  they  had  become  warm  friends.  But  three 
years  after  that  not  ecstatic  comment,  Stevenson,  in  a 
letter  to  W.  E.  Henley,  lists  among  those  worthy  of 
being  honored  with  a  dedication,  "  George  Meredith,  the 
only  man  of  genius  of  my  acquaintance."  "  Talking  of 
Meredith,"  he  continues  significantly,  "  I  have  just 
re-read  for  the  third  and  fourth  time  The  Egoist. 
When  I  shall  have  read  it  the  sixth  or  seventh,  I  begin 


262     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

to  see  I  shall  know  about  it.  ...  I  had  no  idea  of  the 
matter — human,  red  matter — he  has  contrived  to  plug 
and  pack  (the  italics  are  mine)  into  that  strange, 
admirable  book."  Finally,  with  a  passing  glance  at 
George  Eliot,  whom  he  could  never  mention  with  entire 
decorum,  he  concludes :  "  I  see  more  and  more  that 
Meredith  is  built  for  immortality."  A  book  so  plugged 
and  packed  with  matter  that  it  took  four  to  six  readings 
to  extract  its  meaning  certainly  did  not  represent 
Stevenson's  ideal  in  art.  The  full  explanation  of  his 
enthusiasm  does  not  appear  till  1884,  again  in  a  letter 
to  Henley.  This  time  it  is  as  plain  as  could  be  desired: 
"  My  view  of  life  is  essentially  the  comic ;  and  the 
romantically  comic."  Then  after  more  comment  on 
Meredith :  w  The  comedy  which  keeps  the  beauty  and 
touches  the  terrors  of  our  life  (laughter  and  tragedy-in- 
a-good-humor  having  kissed)  that  is  the  last  word  of 
moved  representation;  embracing  the  greatest  number 
of  elements  of  fate  and  character."  Stevenson  might 
fairly  call  the  man  a  genius  who  had  opened  for  him 
his  literary  gospel  and  had  shown  him  a  satisfactory 
point  of  view  from  which  to  represent  the  moving  spec- 
tacle of  life. 

There  are  numerous  indications,  some  of  doubtful 
value,  that  the  followers  of  Meredith  are  beginning  to 
recognize  him  as  a  spiritual  master  rather  than  a  liter- 
ary model.  The  select  literary  clubs  which  in  the  old 
days  used  to  study  the  riddle  of  the  Sphinx  in  Childe 
Roland,  have  discovered  that  Meredith's  poems  are  less 
trite,  equally  difficult,  and  therefore  probably  equally 
profound.  Some  of  the  novels,  too,  have  attracted  those 


HUMANISM  OF  GEORGE  MEREDITH     263 

curious  persons  who  find  their  chief  pleasure  in  perusing 
what  their  friends  declare  impossible.  Four  or  five 
books  have  been  devoted  to  the  exposition  of  Meredith's 
art  and  ideas,  not  all  of  which  are  harder  to  read  than 
the  works  which  they  explain.  But  chiefly  we  must 
reckon  in  the  decisive  tribute  of  the  younger  generation 
of  writers  who  by  imitation  and  open  avowal  declare 
their  deep  indebtedness  to  him.  "  At  the  present 
moment,"  says  Mrs.  Craigie,  "  all  the  most  worthy 
English  novelists,  with  the  exception  of  Thomas  Hardy, 
are  distinguished  disciples  of  George  Meredith."  The 
heterogeneous  character  of  the  alleged  Meredithians — 
Stevenson,  Du  Maurier,  Henley,  Sara  Grand,  Anthony 
Hope,  Maurice  Hewlett,  W.  J.  Locke,  George  Bernard 
Shaw,  G.  K.  Chesterton,  and  many  others — is  sugges- 
tive. It  means  that  to  young  authors  he  has  not  been 
primarily  a  literary  model ;  those  who  have  caught  most 
of  his  spirit  have  least  imitated  his  structure  and  style. 
It  means  that  if  Meredith  is  "  built  for  immortality  " 
he  will  survive  not  merely  as  an  epigrammatist,  or 
as  a  subtle  poet,  or  as  a  psychologizing  novelist,  but 
also  as  a  man  with  a  fund  of  energizing  ideas,  a  con- 
structive critic  of  life,  if  not  an  artist  at  any  rate  a 
genius,  one  of  the  spokesmen  and  master  spirits  of  his 
time. 

Herein  certainly  lies  one  of  his  indubitable  claims  to 
genius:  that  he  studied  and  solved  in  some  measure  the 
basic  problems  of  our  contemporary  literature  half  a 
century  before  it  existed.  Though  his  exposition  was 
unequal  to  his  insight,  and  his  coevals  missed  many  of 
his  points,  such  of  our  authors  as  to-day  face  the  future 


smiling  have  found  him  out.  The  basic  problems  of  con- 
temporary literature  are,  for  the  thoughtful  and  respon- 
sible writer,  manifold  in  appearance  but  in  essence 
single:  How  to  present  a  view  of  life  both  wise  and 
brave,  answering  to  experience  as  well  as  to  desire, 
serviceable  in  art  or  in  the  daily  walk.  Single  in 
essence,  in  appearance  they  are  manifold :  How  to  give 
pleasure  without  corrupting  the  heart,  and  how  to  give 
wisdom  without  chilling  it.  How  to  bring  into  play  the 
great  passions  of  men  without  unchaining  the  beast. 
How  to  believe  in  Darwin  and  the  dignity  of  man.  How 
to  recognize  the  role  of  the  nerves  in  human  action  with- 
out paralyzing  the  nerve  of  action.  How  to  admit  the 
weakness  of  man  without  dashing  his  heroism.  How  to 
see  his  acts  and  respect  his  intentions.  How  to  renounce 
his  superstitions  and  retain  his  faith.  How  to  rebuke 
without  despising  him.  How  to  reform  society  without 
rebelling  against  it.  How  to  laugh  at  its  follies  with- 
out falling  into  contempt.  How  to  believe  that  evil  is 
fleeing  forever  before  good,  but  will  never  be  overtaken 
and  slain.  How  to  look  back  upon  a  thousand  defeats, 
and  yet  cling  to  the  fighting  hope.  If  you  will  go 
through  this  list  of  questions  you  will  not  find  one  that 
Meredith  does  not  answer  or  attempt  to  answer.  Long 
before  Stevenson  began  to  preach  his  gospel  of  cheerful- 
ness and  valor  to  a  dispirited  and  pusillanimous  world 
Meredith  had  marked  the  texts  for  his  homilies.  Long 
before  Mr.  Shaw  broke  into  his  Mephistophelian  laugh- 
ter, and  long  before  Mr.  Chesterton  had  discovered  his 
loyalty  to  the  universe,  when  they — if  one  can  con- 
ceive such  a  thing — were  quietly  sleeping  in  their 


HUMANISM  OF  GEORGE  MEREDITH     265 

cradles,   George  Meredith  had   already   bottled   their 
thunder. 

Richard  Fever  el,  published  in  1859  with  The  Vir- 
ginians, and  Adam  Bede,  The  Tale  of  Two  Cities,  and 
The  Origin  of  Species,  was  a  repudiation  and  a  proph- 
ecy, but  was  recognized  as  neither.  The  Westminster 
Review,  though  perceiving  in  it  observation,  humor, 
passion,  and  tenderness,  declared  that  the  "  book  offers 
no  solution  of  any  of  the  difficulties  it  lays  open  to  us; 
the  nineteenth  century  struggles  through  it  with  but 
faint  glimpses  of  its  goal."  With  interspersed  hints  in 
subsequent  novels,  with  prefaces,  and  with  poems  Mere- 
dith sought  to  amend  the  reviewer's  error,  but  not  till 
1877,  when,  Aristotle  to  his  own  dramatic  cycle,  he 
published  the  Idea  of  Comedy,  did  he  finally  make  clear 
his  message.  From  that  time  it  began  slowly  to  be 
evident  that  he  had  made  his  novels,  after  all,  but  the 
vehicles  of  an  impassioned  conviction.  He,  like  so  many 
earnest  men  of  his  troubled  century,  had  sought  a  way 
of  salvation  from  skepticism,  melancholy,  ennui,  and 
despair ;  and  he  had  found  a  way.  Other  men  had  other 
remedies.  For  Newman  the  one  thing  needful  was  to 
submit  to  authority  and  enter  the  Roman  fold.  Carlyle 
thought  the  best  that  could  be  done  for  a  man  was  to 
find  him  a  master  and  set  him  to  work.  For  Mill  the 
key  to  happiness  was  free  logical  discussion  in  the  inter- 
ests of  humanity.  For  the  men  of  science  it  was  the 
following  of  truth  wherever  it  leads.  Arnold  held  that 
none  of  these  things  was  of  importance  in  comparison 
with  the  ability  to  recognize  "  the  grand  style,"  when- 
ever it  appeared.  To  those  who  have  read  intelligently 


266     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

Meredith's  Idea  of  Comedy,  I  do  not  think  it  will  seem 
an  anticlimax  to  say  that  he  believed  the  one  thing 
needful,  synthesis  of  all  needs,  was  to  instruct  men  in 
the  proper  uses  of  the  comic  spirit,  that  they  might 
laugh  and  be  laughed  at  unto  their  soul's  salvation. 
For  to  him  the  comic  spirit  is  a  fine  celestial  sunlight  in 
the  mind,  answering  to  the  theological  Grace  of  God  in 
the  heart,  which  preserves  those  into  whom  it  passes 
from  every  evil  thing.  It  is  not  hostile  to  prayer  nor 
to  labor  nor  to  logic  nor  to  truth  nor  to  grandeur,  but 
is  very  friendly  to  them  all.  It  keeps  prayer  sweet, 
labor  cheerful,  logic  sane,  truth  serviceable,  and 
grandeur  human.  But  over  every  form  of  animalism, 
egotism,  sentimentalism,  cowardice,  and  unreason,  "  it 
will  look  humanely  malign,  and  cast  an  oblique  light  on 
them,  followed  by  showers  of  silvery  laughter."  For,  to 
quote  from  the  ode  to  the  same  beneficent  spirit  it  is  the 


Sword  of  Common  Sense! 

Our  surest  gift:  the  sacred  chain 

Of  man  to  man. 


Once  grasp  this  Meredithian  idea  of  comedy  and  sud- 
denly you  find  yourself  at  the  center  of  a  coherent  criti- 
cal system.  You  open  the  works  anywhere — barring 
perhaps  some  of  the  more  cryptic  poems — and  you  find 
yourself  at  home  in  an  ordered  well-lighted  world. 
You  perceive  why  the  younger  generation  is  turning 
toward  him,  and  you  see  the  relation  in  which  he  stood 
to  most  of  his  fellows  in  fiction  fifty  years  ago.  The 
definitions  by  which  in  the  essay  the  comic  spirit  is 


HUMANISM  OF  GEORGE  MEREDITH     267 

isolated  furnish  a  formidable  critical  arsenal.  "  The 
sense  of  the  Comic  is  much  blunted  by  habits  of  pun- 
ning and  of  using  humoristic  phrase;  the  trick  of  em- 
ploying Johnsonian  polysyllables  to  treat  of  the  infin- 
itely little  " — that  by  no  means  disposes  of  Dickens  but 
it  casts  an  "  oblique  light  "  upon  him.  Much  more 
penetrating  is  this:  "Comedy  justly  treated  .  .  . 
throws  no  infamous  reflection  upon  life."  How  that 
judges  the  sneering  cynicism  of  all  too  frequent  pas- 
sages in  the  novels  of  Thackeray  like  the  following: 

Oh,  Mr.  Pendennis !  (although  this  remark  does  not  apply 
to  such  a  smart  fellow  as  you)  if  Nature  had  not  made 
provision  for  each  sex  in  the  credulity  of  the  other,  which 
sees  good  qualities  where  none  exist,  good  looks  in  donkey's 
ears,  wit  in  their  numskulls,  and  music  in  their  bray,  there 
would  not  have  been  near  so  much  marrying  and  giving  in 
marriage  as  now  obtains,  and  is  necessary  for  the  due  prop- 
agation of  the  noble  race  to  which  we  belong. 

That  principle  is  far  reaching;  it  condemns  in  a 
single  breath  the  whole  miasmic  marsh-land  of  natural- 
ism. "  It  is  unwholesome  for  men  and  women  to  see 
themselves  as  they  are,  if  they  are  no  better  than  they 
should  be  " — there  is  the  ethical,  or,  if  one  prefers,  the 
sanitary,  plank  in  the  platform  of  the  new  idealism. 
"  The  same  of  an  immoral  may  be  said  of  realistic  exhi- 
bitions of  a  vulgar  society  " — there  is  the  repudiation 
of  wide  wastes  of  the  dry-as-dust  realistic  fiction,  a 
much-needed  denial  of  the  democratic  notion  that  all 
subjects  are  fit  for  art.  In  some  of  the  poems  the 
Comic  Spirit  becomes  almost  truculent  in  its  glee.  It  is 


268     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

clearly  so  in  pitching  upon  any  theatrical  rebel  against 
society ;/  for  example,  in  the  verses  called  "  Manfred  " : 

Projected  from  the  bilious  Childe, 

This  clatter  jaw  his  foot  could  set 

On  Alps,  without  a  breast  beguiled 

To  glow  in  shedding  rascal  sweat. 

Somewhere  about  his  grinder  teeth, 

He  mouthed  of  thoughts  that  grilled  beneath, 

And  summoned  Nature  to  her  feud, 

With  bile  and  buskin  Attitude. 

Meredith  arrived  a  little  too  late  to  play  Childe 
Harold  or  Don  Juan ;  but  if  he  had  not  been  protected 
by  his  guardian  spirit,  he  might  easily  have  taken  a  part 
in  that  more  plaintive  and  dismal  literature  of  despair 
represented  by  numerous  poems  of  Matthew  Arnold.  In 
the  crushed  and  crabbed  verse  of  Meredith's  jibe  at 
Arnold's  Empedocles,  I  confess  to  finding  something 
very  tonic,  something  that  Arnold  as  critic  would  have 
himself  called  tonic : 

He  leaped.    With  none  to  hinder, 

Of  Aetna's  fiery  scoriae 

In  the  next  vomit-shower,  made  he 

A  more  peculiar  cinder. 

And  this  great  Doctor,  can  it  be, 

He  left  no  saner  recipe 

For  men  at  issue  with  despair? 

Admiring,  even  his  poet  owns, 

While  noting  his  fine  lyric  tones, 

The  last  of  him  was  heels  in  air ! 

Each  life  its  critic  deed  reveals: 
And  him  reads  reason  at  his  heels, 
If  heels  in  air  the  last  of  him. 


But  what  has  comedy  to  do  with  tragedy,  and  how  do 
they  become  tragi-comedy?  Well,  in  the  luminous  in- 
toxication of  the  morning  following  the  symposium, 
Socrates  forced  Agathon  and  Aristophanes,  who  alone 
had  stayed  it  out  with  him  till  cockcrow,  to  confess  not 
only  that  tragedy  and  comedy  may  be  composed  by  the 
same  person,  but  also  that  "  the  foundations  of  the 
tragic  and  comic  arts  were  essentially  the  same."  Aris- 
todemus,  who  reported  the  conclusion  of  the  dispute, 
was  unfortunately  asleep  during  the  discussion.  With 
this,  for  that  reason,  unexplained  opinion  of  Socrates, 
Meredith  was  obviously  in  accord.  To  his  view,  life  is 
neither  wholly  comedy  nor  wholly  tragedy,  but  both  at 
once.  In  order  to  distinguish  either  element  one  must 
be  able  to  distinguish  both;  the  comic  spirit,  one  may 
almost  say,  is  that  which  perceives  the  tragic  fault.  In 
order  to  represent  life  bravely  and  wisely,  one  must  see 
it  steadily,  and  see  it  whole.  Such  sight  is  given  only 
to  deep  and  grave  heads.  Those  endowed  with  this 
vision  discern  that  the  great  girders  which  bear  up  the 
world  of  man  are  the  discipline  of  the  passions  by  the 
mind,  loyalty  to  reason,  and  faith  in  civilization.  What- 
ever forces  attempt  to  weaken  these  girders — the  cynic- 
ism of  Don  Juan,  the  despair  of  Empedocles — the  Comic 
Spirit  holds  them,  to  adopt  the  Caesarian  euphemism, 
in  numero  hostium — puts  them  to  the  sword  of  common 
*ense.  The  discernment  that  these  great  girders  are 
essential  to  civilization,  and  the  loyalty  which  in  grave 
men  springs  with  the  discernment,  underlie  every  true 
comedy  and  every  true  tragedy.  But  the  struggle  which 
most  men  undergo  in  disciplining  their  passions,  learn- 


270     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

ing  to  walk  in  the  light  of  reason,  and  preserving  their 
faith  in  civilization,  is  a  strange  series  of  ups  and  downs. 
Comedy  attends  to  their  foolish  falls ;  tragedy  to  their 
painful  failures ;  to  represent  the  whole  course  of  the 
struggle  is  to  write  tragi-comedy. 

Tragi-comedy  as  the  position  of  equipoise  in  life  and 
art — that,  in  Meredith's  time,  was  a  notable  discovery. 
When  we  attempt  to  measure  his  achievement  we  should 
not  lose  sight  of  the  originality,  the  scope,  and  the  diffi- 
culty of  his  design.  He  planned  to  produce  thoughtful 
laughter,  an  aim  which  demanded  that  the  characters 
in  his  novels,  as  well  as  in  his  audience,  should  possess 
some  of  the  culture  of  the  drawing-room.  But  he 
planned  at  the  same  time  to  move  the  great  passions 
which  are  generally  attenuated  under  intensive  cultiva- 
tion. Since  the  Restoration  they  had  almost  disap- 
peared from  the  fiction  of  high  life.  Wordsworth  had 
been  obliged  to  seek  out  the  great  universal  impulses  in 
the  cottages  of  Cumberland  peasants.  The  Brontes 
studied  them  in  mad  country  squires.  George  Eliot 
found  them  among  the  yeomen  of  Warwickshire.  Even 
Thomas  Hardy  has  had  to  resort  to  shepherds  and 
dairy-maids — so  fugitive  is  our  sense  of  solemn  splen- 
dor from  the  roar  of  cities  and  civilized  men.  But  what 
pitiful  antagonists  of  destiny  these  rural  people  of  Mr. 
Hardy  make.  The  intelligence  of  mortals  is  wholly 
inactive  in  the  combat.  In  condemning  the  ways  of  God 
to  man  this  grim  artist  seems  obsessed  by  the  idea  that 
all  nature  is  conspiring  to  bring  a  helpless  humanity 
to  degradation  and  shame.  That  is  hardly  to  see  life 
whole.  Meredith  sought  his  splendor  in  another  place. 


HUMANISM  OF  GEORGE  MEREDITH     271 

His  problem  was  how  to  make  tragedy  and  comedy  meet 
together  in  the  drawing-room.  Comedy  was  there  to 
stay;  but  as  for  tragedy,  Thackeray,  for  example, 
avoided  it.  Dickens  and  his  public  really  preferred 
melodrama  and  bloody  murder. 

To  his  contemporaries  and  predecessors  Meredith 
appears  on  the  whole  to  have  owed  relatively  little, 
though  his  obligations  were  probably  larger  than  has 
generally  been  acknowledged.  What  makes  him  appear 
comparatively  isolated  in  his  time  is  not  his  exemption 
from  contemporary  forces,  but  his  comprehensive  in- 
clusion of  them  within  his  own  complex  mind  and  tem- 
perament. His  culture  is  wide  and  deep.  His  fiction 
gathers  its  virtues  from  poetry,  history,  science,  and 
philosophy.  His  purposefulness  is  fortified  by  an  inti- 
mate and  almost  lifelong  friendship  with  that  fine  aus- 
tere Liberal,  John  Morley,  and  with  that  drily  witty 
master  of  common  sense,  Leslie  Stephen,  and  with  that 
high-aspiring  revered  sage,  Thomas  Carlyle.  In  Farina, 
The  Shaving  of  Shagpat,  The  Ordeal  of  Richard 
Feverel,  Evan  Harrington,  and  The  Egoist  one  may 
possibly  detect  the  influence  of  the  comic  spirit  of 
Meredith's  first  father-in-law,  Thomas  Love  Peacock, 
whose  laughter  leaped  and  flashed  upon  the  humbugs 
and  intellectual  follies  of  his  day  with  much  of  the 
Meredithian  lambency  and  gusto.  On  his  graver  side 
he  shows  a  certain  affiliation  with  George  Eliot ;  but  so 
far  as  the  chronological  indications  go,  he  is  as  likely  to 
have  influenced  her  as  she  to  have  influenced  him.  The 
moral  high  seriousness  and  the  love  of  Nature,  so  con- 
spicuously exhibited  by  both,  may  perhaps  be  ascribed 


272     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

in  part  to  their  common  inheritance  from  Wordsworth. 
The  significant  chapter  in  the  Ordeal  of  Richard  Feverel 
entitled  "  Nature  speaks "  is  strikingly  parallel  not 
merely  in  its  spirit  but  also  in  its  incidents  to  Words- 
worth's Peter  Bell — a  poem  written  to  illustrate  the 
healing  and  redemptive  impulses  from  a  "  vernal  wood." 
But  no  writer  between  Meredith  and  Shakespeare  has 
Meredith's  power  of  marrying  tragedy  and  comedy, 
poetry  and  laughter.  He  is  the  single  exception  to  the 
rule  that  no  disciple  can  stand  up  under  the  overwhelm- 
ing influence  of  the  great  Elizabethan.  Shakespeare 
was  his  master.  Shakespeare  determined  his  point  of 
view  and  the  large  feature  of  his  artistic  representation. 
From  him  he  learned  to  choose  out  for  the  favorite 
theatre  of  his  action  a  country-house,  where,  as  in  a 
court,  were  assembled  enough  actors  of  civilized  life  to 
be  visible  against  the  scenery.  From  him  he  learned  to 
let  poor  clowns  play  humble  parts,  and  if  any  one  had 
to  be  sent  out  on  a  barren  heath  to  send  a  king  who 
even  in  madness  was  a  match  for  the  storm.  From  him 
he  learned  to  line  the  back  and  sides  of  his  stage  with 
the  gray  and  middle  ages  of  wisdom,  pedantry,  sanctity, 
craft,  and  cynicism;  and  then  to  release  in  the  fore- 
ground young  Romeo  and  Juliet,  or  Perdita  and 
Florizel,  or  Ferdinand  and  Miranda  to  discover  the 
brave  new  world  under  the  stinging  rain  of  comment 
from  prudent  or  disillusioned  antiquity;  and  then,  at 
last,  whether  to  youth  and  beauty  the  vista  of  days 
opened  smiling,  or  whether  some  dire  mischance  closed 
their  fond  eyes  forever,  to  intimate  that  to  youth  belong 
the  untrodden  ways. 


HUMANISM  OF  GEORGE  MEREDITH     273 

The  "  criticism  of  life  "  underlying  Meredith's  repre- 
sentations of  it  is  in  its  general  outlines  Shakespearian, 
and  it  is  Shakespearian  in  the  sweetness  and  the  nobility 
of  its  temper.  Meredith,  like  his  master,  accepts  the 
universe  with  a  smile;  but  like  his  master,  he  almost 
immediately  proceeds  to  distinguish  within  the  human 
microcosm  three  distinct  levels  of  being:  blood,  brain, 
and  spirit.  He  is,  to  be  sure,  so  far  a  man  of  his  own 
time  that  he  conceives  the  physical,  the  intellectual,  and 
the  spiritual  as  successive  stages  in  the  grand  evolu- 
tionary process.  He  looks  to  no  Hebrew  chronicler  to 
explain  how  in  the  beginning  light  was  divided  from 
darkness  and  man  from  the  beasts  of  the  field.  He 
ascribes  these  epoch-making  distinctions  to  the  inscrut- 
able workings  of  Life  and  our  mother  Earth — deities 
always  named  by  him  with  reverence;  but,  unlike  the 
naturalistic  novelists  of  his  day,  he  regards  these  dis- 
tinctions as  real,  substantial,  and  established.  He  does 
not  conceive  of  man  as  mere  flesh  or  mere  mind  or  mere 
spirit  but  as,  at  his  healthiest  and  completest,  a  fine 
concord  and  harmony  of  the  three.  All  this  the  reader 
may  find  in  the  following  lines  from  The  Woods  of 
Westermam  "; 

Each  of  each  in  sequent  birth, 
Blood  and  brain  and  spirit,  three 
(Say  the  deepest  gnomes  of  Earth), 
Join  for  true  felicity. 
Are  they  parted,  then  expect 
Someone  sailing  to  be  wrecked : 
Separate  hunting  are  they  sped, 
Scan  the  morsel  coveted. 


274     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

Earth  that  Triad  is :  she  hides 
Joy  from  him  who  that  divides ; 
Showers  it  when  the  three  are  one 
Glassing  her  in  union. 

For  the  novelists  who  represent  man  as  essentially  a 
depraved  animal  Meredith  has  little  but  loathing  and 
contempt.  After  reading  a  naturalistic  work  by  one  of 
his  French  contemporaries  he  writes,  in  1887 :  "  O  what 
a  nocturient,  cacaturient  crew  has  issued  of  the  lens  of 
the  Sun  of  the  mind  on  the  lower  facts  of  life ! — on  sheer 
Realism,  breeder  at  best  of  the  dung-fly.  Yet  has  that 
Realism  been  a  corrective  of  the  more  corruptingly 
vaporous  with  its  tickling  hints  at  sensuality.  It  may 
serve  ultimately  in  form  of  coprolite  to  fatten  poor 
soil  for  better  produce." 

Yet  Meredith  declares  repeatedly  in  his  letters  that 
"  a  frank  acceptance  of  Reality  is  the  firm  basis  of  the 
Ideal."  As  a  moralist  he  is  anti-Puritan.  He  has  no 
patience  with  an  ascetic  mortification  of  the  flesh.  Like 
Browning's  David,  he  rejoices  in  "  our  manhood's  prime 
vigour  " ;  he  accepts  with  a  relish  the  legitimate  physical 
gratifications  of  life — 

And  the  meal,  the  rich  dates  yellowed  over  with  gold  dust 

divine, 
And  the  locust-flesh  steeped  in  the  pitcher,  the  full  draught 

of  wine. 

To  the  Rev.  Augustus  Jessop  he  writes :  "  Let  men 
make  good  blood,  I  constantly  cry.  I  hold  that  to  be 
rightly  materialistic — to  understand  and  take  nature 


HUMANISM  OF  GEORGE  MEREDITH     275 

as  she  is — is  to  get  on  the  true  divine  highroad.  That 
we  should  attain  to  a  healthy  humanity,  is  surely  the 
most  pleasing  thing  in  God's  sight."  With  allusion  to 
Hawthorne,  he  says  in  1865 :  "  I  strive  by  study  of 
humanity  to  represent  it :  not  its  morbid  action.  I  have 
a  tendency  to  do  that,  which  I  repress :  for,  in  delineat- 
ing it,  there  is  no  gain.  In  all  my,  truly,  very  faulty 
works,  there  is  this  aim.  Much  of  my  strength  lies  in 
painting  morbid  emotion  and  exceptional  positions ;  but 
my  conscience  will  not  let  me  so  waste  my  time." 

These  convictions  are  illustrated  in  his  novels  by  his 
representations  of  what  we  should  call  to-day  the 
"  eugenic  "  marriage,  and  by  his  unrivalled  array  of 
healthy  "  fair  women  and  brave  men."  His  heroines 
can  walk,  ride,  row,  and  swim  distances  which  to  any  one 
of  Jane  Austen's  ladies  would  have  been  appalling — of 
which  the  mere  prospect  would  probably  have  caused 
her  to  sink  swooning  into  the  arms  of  her  escort.  He 
recognizes  and  treats  frankly  enough  the  magnetic  force 
of  sexual  attraction ;  but  he  recognizes  it,  by  choice,  in 
men  and  women  who  live  above  the  level  of  sensuality, 
and  in  whom  this  mysterious  force  has  been  metamor- 
phosed into  a  general  energizer  of  the  intelligence  and 
spirit.  In  his  exquisite  poem,  Love  in  the  Valley,  for 
example,  the  physical  root  of  the  emotion  is  adequately 
indicated,  but  what  is  offered  for  our  delectation  is  its 
bursting  through  the  senses  into  fragrant  and  luxuriant 
blossom  in  the  mind  and  the  imagination.  The  speaker, 
like  a  right  Shakespearian  lover,  is  keenly  alive  to  the 
sensuous  charm  of  the  beloved  being,  but  his  higher  fac- 
ulties exalt  and  transfigure  the  delight  of  the  senses, 


276     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

and  hold  him  rapt,  reverent,  and  breathless  with  adora- 
tion. I  quote  a  few  stanzas  which  may  be  paralleled 
by  his  description  of  Lucy  Desborough  in  The  Ordeal 
of  Richard  Feverel  or  by  the  description  of  Meredith's 
second  wife  in  the  Letters,  ending  thus :  "  When  her 
hand  rests  in  mine,  the  world  seems  to  hold  its  breath, 
and  the  sun  is  moveless.  I  take  hold  of  Eternity." — 

Under  yonder  beech-tree  single  on  the  green-sward, 

Couched  with  her  arms  behind  her  golden  head, 
Knees  and  tresses  folded  to  slip  and  ripple  idly, 

Lies  my  young  love  sleeping  in  the  shade. 
Had  I  the  heart  to  slide  an  arm  beneath  her, 

Press  her  parting  lips  as  her  waist  I  gather  slow, 
Waking  in  amazement  she  could  not  but  embrace  me : 

Then  would  she  hold  me  and  never  let  me  go? 

•  •...•*• 

Shy  as  the  squirrel  and  wayward  as  the  swallow, 

Swift  as  the  swallow  along  the  river's  light 
Circleting  the  surface  to  meet  his  mirrored  winglets, 

Fleeter  she  seems  in  her  stay  than  in  her  flight. 
Shy  as  the  squirrel  that  leaps  among  the  pine-tops, 

Wayward  as  the  swallow  overhead  at  set  of  sun, 
She  whom  I  love  is  hard  to  catch  and  conquer, 

Hard,  but  O  the  glory  of  the  winning  were  she  won. 

When  her  mother  tends  her  before  the  laughing  mirror, 

Tying  up  her  laces,  looping  up  her  hair, 
Often  she  thinks,  were  this  wild  thing  wedded, 

More  love  should  I  have,  and  much  less  care. 
When  her  mother  tends  her  before  the  lighted  mirror, 

Loosening  her  laces,  combing  down  her  curls, 
Often  she  thinks,  were  this  wild  thing  wedded, 

I  should  miss  but  one  for  many  boys  and  girls. 


HUMANISM  OF  GEORGE  MEREDITH     277 

When  at  dawn  she  sighs,  and  like  an  infant  to  the  window 

Turns  grave  eyes  craving  light,  released  from  dreams, 
Beautiful  she  looks,  like  a  white  water  lily 

Bursting  out  of  bud  in  haven  of  the  streams. 
When  from  bed  she  rises  clothed  from  neck  to  ankle 

In  her  long  nightgown  sweet  as  boughs  of  May, 
Beautiful  she  looks,  like  a  tall  garden  lily 

Pure  from  the  night,  and  splendid  for  the  day. 

The  peculiar  specialty  of  the  Meredithian  heroine, 
however,  is  neither  health  nor  beauty,  but  brains.  In 
behalf  of  women  George  Meredith  repudiates  alike 
Alfred  Austin's  old  Tory  ideal — the  soft  shy  mate  that 
sits  on  the  nest  and  never  stirs;  the  Pre-Raphaelite 
ideal — all  lips  and  neck  and  dreaming  eyes  ;  and  Thomas 
Hardy's  romantic  ideal — the  fair  puppet  of  passionate 
impulse.  His  view  of  the  subject  resembles  that  of 
John  Stuart  Mill  in  his  fervid  treatise  on  The  Subjec- 
tion of  Women — a  plea  for  the  emancipation  of  women 
in  their  own  interest  and  in  the  interest  of  society  at 
large.  "  I  can  foresee  great  and  blessed  changes  for  the 
race  when  they  have  achieved  independence  " ;  he  writes 
in  a  letter  of  1888,  "  for  that  must  come  of  the  exercise 
of  their  minds — the  necessity  for  which  is  induced  by 
their  reliance  on  themselves  for  subsistence."  To  his 
sense,  many  of  the  Victorian  representations  of  women 
in  art  and  in  literature  reflect  but  the  unsubdued  Turk- 
ish instincts  of  the  male.  His  conscience  rebels  against 
the  imposition  upon  fair  English  girls  of  the  ideals  of 
the  harem.  His  intelligence  is  irritated,  as  that  of  most 
men  is  from  time  to  time,  by  the  difficulty  of  settling  any 
question  with  a  typical  representative  of  "  the  sex  "  on 


278     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

rational  grounds.  The  subtlest  sonnet  sequence  in 
English,  his  Modern  Love,  is  a  series  of  cries  of  exas- 
peration and  pain  at  the  baffling  indirectness  of  the  deal- 
ing of  woman  with  man : 

Their  sense  is  with  their  senses  all  mixed  in, 
Destroyed  by  subtleties  these  women  are! 
More  brain,  O  Lord,  more  brain !  or  we  shall  mar 
Utterly  this  fair  garden  we  might  win. 

Clara  Middleton  in  The  Egoist,  Diana  of  the  Cross- 
ways,  and  Aminta  are  among  his  notable  essays  toward 
the  establishment  of  a  new  ideal  of  "  femininity."  With 
the  young  health  of  Nature  in  May  and  the  beauty 
of  the  white  birch  tree  they  unite  a  keen  critical  faculty 
which  is  their  mark  of  intellectual  independence.  Emo- 
tional enough,  all  of  them,  they  are  not  in  the  long  run 
at  the  mercy  of  their  emotions.  If  they  have  been  duped 
in  their  first  adventure  with  society,  they  have  the  wit 
to  extricate  themselves  from  situations  threatening  dis- 
aster, and  to  reconstruct  their  lives  in  conformity  with 
a  rational  ideal  and,  if  necessary,  like  George  Eliot  in 
defiance  of  conventions — a  readjustment,  by  the  way, 
as  remote  from  sensual  philandering  as  the  north  pole 
is  from  the  south  pole.  Of  Diana,  Meredith  says 
proudly,  "  she  has  no  puppet  pliancy."  Regarded  as  a 
character  she  has  grievous  faults.  Regarded  as  a  piece 
of  characterization,  she  is  not  entirely  plausible.  But 
regarded  as  the  imperfect  human  illustration  of  certain 
ideals,  she  is — in  her  valiancy  and  in  her  power  of  intel- 
lectual growth  and  spiritual  rejuvenescence — one  of  the 
most  interesting  and  inspiriting  women  in  English 
fiction. 


HUMANISM  OF  GEORGE  MEREDITH     279 

In  order  to  "  civilize  "  the  women  Meredith  sees  very 
clearly  that  it  is  necessary  at  the  same  time  to  civilize 
the  men.  Civilization  implies  for  him  the  emancipation 
of  human  conduct  from  non-rational  controls.  It  means 
establishing  in  secure  sovereignty  within  each  individual 
man  a  benevolent  and  beneficent  mind.  He  has  no  over- 
sanguine  expectation  of  the  completion  of  the  evolu- 
tionary process.  He  sees  the  serenity  and  freedom  of 
reason 

By  more  elusive  savages  assailed 

On  each  ascending  stage. 

He  girds  on  the  sword  of  the  Comic  Spirit  and  unleashes 
the  hounds  of  laughter  to  hunt  down  the  "  savages  " 
lurking  and  skulking  in  the  breasts  of  those  repre- 
sentatives of  the  race  who  are  in  outward  appearance 
most  remote  from  our  ancestors  of  the  cave.  His  game 
includes  the  philosopher  who  bids  us  trust  our  emotional 
instincts — "  accept  the  throb  for  lord  of  us  " ;  or  who 
bids  us  bow  the  knee  to  hoary  and  outworn  conventions ; 
or  who  lays  us  prostrate  by  mumbling  "  the  crackskull 
name  of  Fate  " ;  or  who  sets  up  self  as  God.  Meredith 
had  drunk  deep  of  the  intellectual  radicalism  of  Mill 
and  Morley,  and  the  spirit  of  it  profoundly  affects  his 
representations  of  men  in  fiction.  The  qualities  which, 
above  everything  else,  he  glorifies  in  his  young  men  are 
intrepidity  and  will;  the  defects  upon  which  his  muse 
looks  malignly  are  "  the  untrimmed  lamp  and  the  ungirt 
loin."  The  virtues  which  he  admires  in  men  of  maturity 
are  wisdom  and  generosity ;  the  sins  which  he  castigates 
are  innumerable,  but  most  conspicuous  among  them  are 
sensuality,  pride,  obstinacy,  and  egotism.  Sir  Wil- 


£80     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

loughby  Patterne  in  The  Egoist  is  his  great  and  un- 
rivalled masterpiece  in  the  remorseless  dissection  of  male 
egotism  masking  as  sensibility  and  refinement.  If  the 
book  were  read,  chewed,  and  "  inwardly  digested  "  by 
every  young  man  contemplating  courtship  or  marriage, 
we  might  reasonably  look  two  or  three  generations  hence 
for  some  wholesome  clarifications  and  amendments  in  the 
spiritual  relations  of  the  sexes.  Sir  Willoughby  Pat- 
terne is  his  most  elaborate  and  penetrating  study  of  a 
single  specimen  of  the  lordly  species,  but  his  richest 
and  most  various  exhibition  of  critical  portraits  of  men 
is  in  The  Ordeal  of  Richard  Feverel,  where  the  light  of 
the  Comic  Spirit  falls  brilliantly  upon  the  sentimentality 
and  the  tragic  pride,  obstinacy,  and  egotism  of  Sir 
Austin  Feverel;  the  deliberate  sensuality  and  the  cynic- 
ism of  Adrian  Harley ;  the  gluttony  and  hypochondria 
of  Hippias  Feverel ;  the  undisciplined  wrath  of  Farmer 
Blaize,  the  dull  Philistinism  of  Thompson  pere,  the  fol- 
lies of  young  Richard's  passion  and  hot-headed  gener- 
osity, the  dull  juvenile  obscenity  of  Ripton  Thompson; 
and  upon  sundry  others.  Every  one  of  these  men  was 
vitally  conceived.  Each  one  of  them  has  his  winsome 
and  lovable  aspects.  Meredith  seems  incapable  of  hat- 
ing or  despising  utterly  any  one  of  his  kind.  But  his 
warm  human  friendliness  is  edged,  like  a  surgeon's  knife, 
for  discrimination.  He  cuts  deep  but  the  operation  is 
therapeutic.  "  By  my  faith  in  the  head,"  he  cries, 
quaintly  imaging  his  reliance  upon  the  widening  of  intel- 
lectual light: 

I  can  hear  a  faint  crow 
Of  the  cock  of  fresh  mornings,  far,  far,  yet  distinct. 


HUMANISM  OF  GEORGE  MEREDITH     281 

What  does  an  evolutionist  like  Meredith  mean  when 
he  distinguishes  the  spiritual  from  the  intellectual 
world?  He  has  himself  some  difficulty  in  telling  us,  but 
one  gathers  from  his  various  utterances  that  to  "  live  in 
the  spirit  "  is  to  live  steadily  above  the  clamor  of  the 
flesh  and  the  crying  of  self-interest  to  the  will.  Inter- 
course with  men  who  dwell  habitually  at  that  level  has, 
as  most  of  us  know,  an  ennobling  influence  akin  to  that 
of  great  works  of  art,  love  of  country,  and  religion. 
Meredith  had  no  respect  for  the  orthodox  theology  of 
his  time,  but  he  called  himself  a  "  practical  Christian," 
and,  to  my  sense,  he  writes,  in  frequent  passages  of  his 
correspondence,  like  a  man  who  has  experienced  what 
theologians  call  "  the  peace  of  God."  In  1872  he  writes 
to  his  son: 

You  know  how  Socrates  loved  Truth.  Virtue  and  truth 
are  one.  Look  for  the  truth  in  everything,  and  follow  it, 
and  you  will  then  be  living  justly  before  God.  Let  nothing 
flout  your  sense  of  a  Supreme  Being,  and  be  certain  that 
your  understanding  wavers  whenever  you  chance  to  doubt 
that  he  leads  to  good.  We  grow  to  good  as  the  plant  grows 
to  light.  The  school  has  only  to  look  through  history  for  a 
scientific  assurance  of  it.  And  do  not  lose  the  habit  of  pray- 
ing to  the  unseen  Divinity.  Prayer  for  worldly  goods  is 
worse  than  fruitless,  but  prayer  for  strength  of  soul  is  that 
passion  of  the  soul  which  catches  the  gift  it  seeks. 

In  "  the  first  ten  minutes  of  1878  "  he  sends  to  John 
Morley  a  new  year's  greeting,  pulsing  still  with  the 
mystical  exultation  which  the  writer  felt  when  he  hailed 
the  new  year  under  the  midnight  skies  to  the  sound  of 
the  new  year's  bells: 


282     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

To  come  from  a  gaze  at  the  stars — Orion  and  shaking 
Sirius  below  him — is  to  catch  a  glance  at  the  inscrutable 
face  of  him  that  hurries  us  on,  as  on  a  wheel,  from  dust  to 
dust — I  thought  of  you  and  how  it  might  be  with  you  this 
year:  hoped  for  good:  saw  beyond  good  and  evil  to  great 
stillness,  another  form  of  moving  for  you  and  me.  It  seems 
to  me  that  Spirit  is, — how,  where,  and  by  what  means  in- 
volving us,  none  can  say.  But  in  this  life  there  is  no  life 
save  in  spirit.  The  rest  of  life,  and  we  may  know  it  in 
love, — is  an  aching  and  a  rotting. 

When  in  1885  Meredith's  wife  lay  dying,  he  wrote  to 
John  Morley :  "  Happily  for  me,  I  have  learnt  to  live 
much  in  the  spirit  and  see  brightness  on  the  other  side 
of  life,  otherwise  this  running  of  my  poor  doe  with  the 
inextricable  arrow  in  her  flanks,  would  pull  me  down 
too.  As  it  is,  I  sink  at  times.  I  need  all  my  strength  to 
stand  the  harsh  facts  of  existence.  I  wish  it  were  I  to 
be  the  traveller  instead."  After  her  death :  "  While 
she  lingered  I  could  not  hope  for  it  to  last,  and  now  I 
could  crave  any  of  the  latest  signs  of  her  breathing — a 
weakness  of  my  flesh.  When  the  mind  shall  be  steadier, 
I  shall  have  her  calmly  present — past  all  tears."  Two 
days  later :  "  She  was  the  best  of  wives,  truest  among 
human  creatures  ...  I  believe  in  Spirit,  and  I  have 
her  with  me  here,  though  at  present  I  cannot  get  to  calm 
of  thought,  all  the  scenes  of  her  long  endurance,  and  the 
days  of  peace  before  it  rise  up." 

I  have  been  attempting  to  show  why  Meredith's  "  criti- 
cism of  life  "  impresses  one,  as,  on  the  whole,  unusually 
adequate  for  a  writer  of  our  bewildered  age.  Perhaps 
the  rarest  note  in  the  literature  of  our  time  is  nobility 
of  feeling.  Meredith  strikes  that  note  on  whatever  level 


he  touches  the  strings  of  life.  Like  his  master  Shake- 
speare, speaking  nobly  of  the  body,  nobly  of  the  mind, 
and  nobly  of  the  spirit,  he  sounds  the  chord  of  full 
harmony  for  which  our  hearts  are  eager.  "  Between 
realism  and  idealism,"  he  declares,  "  there  is  no  natural' 
conflict.  This  completes  that."  Though  his  craftsman- 
ship and  power  of  representation  were  inferior  to  his 
conceptive  and  critical  faculties,  he  produced  a  body  of 
work  which  richly  remunerates  the  explorer.  Some  of 
his  contemporaries  possessed  separately  in  a  higher 
degree  the  intellectual  or  the  emotional  powers  with 
which  he  was  gifted;  but  no  one  of  them  fused  within 
himself  so  many  and  so  diverse  powers.  He  woke  early 
to  the  necessity  and  the  possibility  of  a  new  synthesis. 
His  first  novel,  produced  far  back  in  the  middle  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  seems  incredibly  fresh  to-day,  and 
would  seem  incredibly  contemporaneous  if  our  living 
writers  had  taught  us  to  expect  from  them  anything  so 
sound  and  sweet.  To  an  American  critic  he  wrote  in 
1887 :  "  I  think  that  all  right  use  of  life,  is  to  pave 
ways  for  the  firmer  footing  of  those  who  succeed  us ;  as 
to  my  works,  I  know  them  faulty,  think  them  of  worth 
only  when  they  point  and  aid  to  that  end."  In  close 
touch  with  distinguished  leaders  of  Liberal  thought,  he 
heartily  partook  in  their  sense  of  high  responsibility  to 
society  and  in  their  resolution  to  make  war  without  truce 
upon  the  confederated  lusts  and  egotisms  of  unredeemed 
animal  man.  His  sonnet  to  "  J.  M."  is  almost  Miltonic 
in  its  note  of  valorous  consecration : 

Our  faith  is  ours  and  comes  not  on  a  tide: 

And  whether  Earth's  great  offspring,  by  decree, 


284.  ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

Must  rot  if  they  abjure  rapacity, 

Not  argument  but  effort  shall  decide. 

They  number  many  heads  in  that  hard  flock: 

Trim  swordsmen  they  push  forth ;  yet  try  thy  steel. 

Thou,  fighting  for  poor  human  kind,  wilt  feel 

The  strength  of  Roland  in  thy  wrist  to  hew 

A  chasm  sheer  into  the  barrier  rock, 

And  bring  the  army  of  the  faithful  through. 

Few,  indeed,  are  the  writers  of  fiction  who  have  striven 
so  steadily  to  seize  and  conserve  for  posterity  the  sound 
ideas  afloat  in  their  time.  In  these  four  lines  from 
A  Reading  of  Earth  we  touch  upon  the  controlling  prin- 
ciple of  all  Meredith's  work: 

Thou  under  stress  of  the  strife, 
Shalt  hear  for  sustainment  supreme, 
The  cry  of  the  conscience  of  life: 
Keep  the  young  generations  in  hail, 
And  bequeath  them  no  tumbled  house. 


XI 
SHAKESPEARE,  OUR  CONTEMPORARY 

WHEN  we  commemorate  the  death  of  a  great  man,  we 
are  accustomed  to  recount  his  virtues,  and,  according 
to  the  measure  of  our  ability,  to  reanimate  his  dust.  In 
the  case  of  Shakespeare  the  dearth  of  biographical  docu- 
ments and  the  perverse  subtlety  of  posterity  have  ren- 
dered it  difficult  to  perform  these  rites  of  honor.  Minute 
research  recovers  a  christened,  marrying,  acting,  play- 
writing,  shareholding,  litigating,  will-making  person  of 
the  slightest  inspirational  quality.  Seventeenth  century 
reference  is  rich  in  praise  of  the  writings,  but  indicates 
little  more  of  the  man  than  that  he  was  of  "  upright 
demeanor,"  "  civil,"  "  honest,"  "  fluent,"  and  of  an 
"  open  and  free  nature."  The  Shakespeare  whom  we 
would  honor,  we  know  almost  exclusively  through  his 
works.  As  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  has  finely  said :  "  He 
wove  upon  the  roaring  loom  of  Time  the  garment  that 
we  see  him  by;  and  the  earth  at  Stratford  closed  over 
the  broken  shuttle." 

From  the  works,  however,  each  age  has  reconstructed 
"  Shakespeare  the  man  "  very  much  as,  from  a  survey 
of  the  world,  each  age  has  reconstructed  the  Creator: 
sometimes  expatiating  in  folios  on  the  attributes  of 
deity;  sometimes  content  with  asking  us  to  adore  the 
Great  Unknowable.  The  young  Milton  meditating  on 


286     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

the  works  becomes  a  monument  of  wonder  and  astonish- 
ment ;  and  Goethe  in  his  old  age  exclaims,  "  But  we  can- 
not talk  about  Shakespeare ;  everything  is  inadequate." 
In  the  romantic  days  when  men  worshiped  Nature,  a 
pious  German  editor  held  that  the  works  of  Shakespeare 
were  an  "  integral  part  of  nature  and  therefore  above 
criticism."  Since  Hazlitt  launched  his  paradox,  that 
"  no  really  great  man  ever  thought  himself  so,"  perhaps 
the  most  striking  and  popular  notion  concerning  the 
poet  is  that  he  did  not  know  what  he  was  about.  The 
spirit  of  our  day,  with  its  new  naturalistic  philosophies, 
finds  this  notion  in  happy  accord  with  its  inclination. 
That  he  did  not  know  what  he  was  about  is,  for  example, 
what  endears  to  our  time  Remain  Roland's  great  artist- 
soul,  Jean  Christophe.  It  is  the  mark  by  which  we  rec- 
ognize the  supreme  figures  in  contemporary  literature. 
We  should  like  to  think  of  Shakespeare  as  our  own  con- 
temporary. And  so  our  current  criticism — with  its  new 
friendliness  to  the  life  of  the  senses,  to  "  vital  forces," 
to  the  spontaneous,  the  natural,  the  instinctive,  the  pur- 
poseless— pleasantly  flatters  itself  by  discovering  in  the 
works  of  the  world's  master  dramatist  not  a  thinking, 
deliberate  human  architect  but  an  unconscious,  unmoral, 
natural  force,  working  effortless  miracles  like  the  apian 
parthenons  or  the  intricate  arras  of  the  frost. 

This  current  view  of  Shakespeare  as  a  neutral,  un- 
moral, unconscious  creative  force  rests  upon  a  super- 
ficially plausible  but,  as  I  believe,  a  thoroughly  fallacious 
argument,  which  runs  something  like  this :  Shakespeare 
created  a  various  world  in  the  image  of  that  in  which  we 
live.  It  is  peopled  with  kings  and  peasants,  saints  and 


SHAKESPEARE,  OUR  CONTEMPORARY    287 

sinners,  sages  and  fools,  men  and  monsters,  each  obedient 
to  the  dictation  of  his  own  heart,  belly,  or  other  oracle 
of  his  destiny.  It  is  neither  a  better  nor  a  worse  place 
of  residence  than  New  York  or  London.  With  impartial 
hand  its  maker  has  unloosed  the  powers  of  good  and  evil 
to  work  out  their  eternal  conflict,  with  no  more  of  divine 
interposition  than  is  observable  upon  this  afflicted  planet. 
The  virtuous  are  insecure  in  felicity;  justice  is  fre- 
quently thwarted;  the  treacherous  and  bloody  villain 
works  his  will ;  and  the  innocent  go  down  with  the  guilty 
to  disaster  and  death.  To  attribute  to  the  author  the 
sentiment  of  any  one  of  his  dramatis  persona  is,  as 
Juliet's  nurse  would  say,  "  very  weak  dealing  " ;  for  the 
chances  are  that  the  chosen  sentiment  is  contradicted  in 
the  next  scene  by  another  of  the  dramatis  personce. 
"  No  critical  test  has  yet  been  found,"  says  Sir  Sidney 
Lee  in  the  latest  edition  of  his  Life,  "  whereby  to  disen- 
tangle Shakespeare's  personal  feelings  or  opinions  from 
those  which  he  imputes  to  the  creatures  of  his  dramatic 
world.  It  was  contrary  to  Shakespeare's  dramatic  aim 
to  label  or  catalogue  in  drama  his  private  sympathies 
or  antipathies." 

This  parallel  between  the  real  world  and  the  world  of 
Shakespeare's  imagination  neglects  one  immensely  im- 
portant difference,  which  is  overlooked  only  because  it  is 
so  obvious,  but  which,  adequately  apprehended,  destroys 
the  illusion  of  parallelism  altogether,  and  explodes  the 
theory  of  authorial  reticence  and  dramatic  impersonal- 
ity. The  difference  is  this:  In  viewing  the  real  world 
we  frequently  misunderstand  the  characters  and  motives 
of  people  who  are  very  near  to  us,  and  we  frequently 


288     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

miss  the  significance  of  important  events  which  are  tak- 
ing place  under  our  eyes.  The  grief  of  those  we  love  is 
often  inarticulate  and  unknown  to  us ;  passion  sometimes 
gives  no  sign;  hypocrisy  wears  its  mask  unpenetrated ; 
and  iniquity  often  goes  not  merely  unpunished  but  unde- 
tected and  even  unsuspected  to  the  grave.  In  partial 
or  complete  ignorance,  even  the  wise  and  sensitive 
among  us  misplace  their  affection,  their  admiration, 
their  compassion;  and  dull  souls  walk  daily  among 
tragic  and  comic  friends  and  neighbors  without  a  smile 
or  a  tear. 

In  viewing  Shakespeare's  imaginary  world,  on  the 
other  hand,  we  are  all  constrained  to  see  and  to  feel 
poignantly  the  emotional  and  moral  significance  of  every 
character  and  every  event.  We  follow  the  course  of  the 
great  passions,  which  for  us  have  no  underground  chan- 
nels, from  their  inception  to  their  catastrophic  close. 
The  lid  of  life  is  off.  We  gaze  into  the  heart  of  all  the 
crises.  The  bosoms  of  sinners  have  no  secrets  for  us ; 
we  have  attended  them  in  each  step  that  led  to  their 
doloroso  passo.  The  just  and  the  unjust  man  stand 
for  us  naked  in  their  divers  qualities,  as  we  are  told 
they  shall  stand  in  the  Day  of  Judgment.  There  is  not 
the  least  ambiguity  in  their  appeal  to  our  emotions  or 
our  judgment.  The  master  of  the  spectacle  has  bared 
to  the  last  filament  their  characters,  their  motives,  and 
their  intentions;  for  Shakespeare's  technique  aims  at 
delight  not  by  the  defeat  but  by  the  fulfilment  of  ex- 
pectation. His  figures  are  so  placed,  so  contrasted,  so 
lighted  from  within  and  from  without — by  soliloquy, 
aside,  chorus,  and  direct  speech  and  act — that  our  sym- 


SHAKESPEARE,  OUR  CONTEMPORARY    289 

pathies  go  right ;  go  where  he  intended  that  they  should 
go.  If  goodness  and  beauty  are  not  always  fortunate 
in  the  plot,  they  are  invariably  recognized  and  loved  by 
the  spectators.  If  the  dramatis  persona  do  not  receive 
poetic  justice  in  the  play,  they  always  receive  it  in  the 
audience ! 

This  clarifying  of  the  judgment  and  this  direction  of 
the  sympathies  are  precisely  Shakespeare's  self-revela- 
tion. His  intention  is  to  be  inferred,  like  that  of  any 
master  craftsman,  from  his  effect.  To  know  what  he 
thought  about  life,  the  normally  constituted  reader  or 
spectator  has  only  to  consult  his  own  emotions  when 
they  have  been  stirred  by  the  presence  of  the  master's 
adored  and  execrated  creatures.  But  we  err  through  a 
grievous  lack  of  reflection,  if  we  attribute  Shakespeare's 
effect  primarily  to  our  own  intelligence  and  discrimina- 
tion ;  for,  as  I  have  just  insisted,  Shakespeare  presents 
to  us,  in  place  of  the  bewildering  and  uncertain  reality, 
a  world  artfully  prepared,  unveiled,  intelligible,  with 
every  value  already  discriminated.  Shakespeare  holds 
the  "  mirror  "  up  to  nature,  but  the  light  which  renders 
the  reflected  objects  visible  is  not  the  light  of  the  sun, 
but  the  illumination  of  the  mirror-maker's  "  comprehen- 
sive soul."  His  characters  do  not  wait  for  our  praise 
or  blame.  At  their  very  advent  in  the  world  of  the 
imagination  lago  stood  in  the  eternal  shadow  of  his 
creator's  condemnation,  and  Desdemona  walked  in  the 
light  of  his  countenance.  We,  with  our  essentially 
superfluous  feeling  and  intelligence,  are  asked  to  judge 
a  case  which  has  already  come  to  judgment. 

All  this  amounts  to  a  declaration  that  Shakespeare 


290     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

reveals  himself  through  his  work  as  a  mind  in  which  the 
great  creative  and  shaping  force  of  the  imagination  is 
constantly  regulated  and  directed  by  a  critical  in- 
telligence, stamping  values  upon  the  things  created, 
and  aiming  steadily  at  a  total  aesthetic  and  moral 
effect  which  was  approved  by  the  best  sense  of  his 
own  time,  and  has  endured  the  scrutiny  of  three  hun- 
dred years. 

Those  of  us  who,  trusting  in  this  "  argument  from 
design,"  hold  this  view  of  him,  and  resent  honoring  his 
memory  with  the  "  naturalists  "  by  denying  him  intelli- 
gence, self-knowledge,  morality,  and  the  normal  human 
loyalties,  have  indeed  some  high  modern  authorities  on 
our  side.  Goethe,  for  example,  said  to  Eckermann, 
"  The  poet  must  know  what  effects  he  wishes  to  produce, 
and  regulate  the  nature  of  his  characters  accordingly. 
.  .  .  What  would  be  the  use  of  poets,  if  they  only 
repeated  the  record  of  the  historian?  The  poet  must 
go  further,  and  give  us,  if  possible,  something  higher 
and  better.  All  the  characters  of  Sophocles  have  some- 
thing of  that  great  poet's  lofty  soul ;  and  it  is  the  same 
with  the  characters  of  Shakespeare.  That  is  as  it  ought 
to  be."  Coleridge  perhaps  slightly  overstated  our  case 
when  he  asserted  that  no  man  was  ever  yet  a  great  poet 
without  being  at  the  same  time  a  great  philosopher. 
But  those  who  stand  for  the  recognition  of  the  intel- 
lectual element  in  poetic  genius,  and,  in  spite  of  current 
poetic  practice  and  precept,  cling  to  the  belief  that  the 
poet  needs  to  know  something  and  to  be  something,  find 
satisfaction  in  Coleridge's  summary  description  of 
Shakespeare's  talent:  "What  then,  shall  we  say?  even 


SHAKESPEARE,  OUR  CONTEMPORARY    291 

this,  that  Shakespeare,  no  mere  child  of  nature;  no 
automaton  of  genius;  no  passive  vehicle  of  inspiration 
.  .  .  first  studied  patiently,  meditated  deeply,  under- 
stood minutely,  till  knowledge,  become  habitual  and 
intuitive,  wedded  itself  to  his  habitual  feelings." 

The  chief  argument  in  favor  of  our  view,  however,  is 
not  that  it  is  in  harmony  with  the  view  of  Goethe  and  of 
Coleridge,  but  that  it  is  in  harmony  with  the  view  of  the 
men  among  whom  Shakespeare  lived.  It  is  consonant 
with  their  eulogies  of  him,  and  also  with  their  general 
conceptions  of  the  poet  and  the  poetic  art.  The  cor- 
rection of  many  of  our  modern  misinterpretations  is  to 
step  through  and  ignore  the  commentators  of  the  last 
hundred  years,  and  to  re-read  the  text  in  the  light  of 
Elizabethan  and  Jacobean  criticism  and  theory.  In 
making  this  return,  it  is  to  be  remembered  that  Shake- 
speare among  his  fellow-dramatists  is,  with  very  few 
exceptions,  distinctly  among  his  inferiors,  not  merely 
in  respect  to  poetry  but  also  in  respect  to  morality  and 
intelligence.  If  you  pass  from  reading  Shakespeare  to 
Dekker,  Marston,  Middleton,  Heywood,  you  feel  your- 
self descending  from  the  highlands  to  the  foothills  and 
the  plain.  If  you  wish  to  remain  long  in  the  company 
of  the  grave  and  capacious  wits  who  made  the  glory  of 
the  Great  Age,  you  must  leave  the  Bankside.  But  you 
may  read  in  turn  Sidney's  Apology,  a  sermon  of 
Hooker's,  an  epithalamion  of  Spenser's,  an  essay  of 
Bacon's,  a  chapter  of  the  King  James  Bible,  the  literary 
note-book  of  Jonson,  or  the  prose  passage  in  Henr\y  V 
discussing  the  king's  responsibility  for  the  souls  of  his 
soldiers — without  any  shocking  change  of  elevation. 


292     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

If  one  consults  with  this  group  of  Shakespeare's 
peers,  one  learns  a  good  many  points  about  the  temper 
of  the  age,  which  many  recent  writers  have  forgotten. 
It  is  perfectly  clear,  for  example,  that  the  Elizabethans 
were  not  ashamed  of  their  moral  intentions.  From 
Sidney  to  Jonson  it  is  agreed  that  the  "  very  end  of 
Poesie  "  is  the  delightful  teaching  of  morality ;  to  make 
men  love  the  good  and  eschew  the  evil.  And  Sidney,  the 
adored  representative  of  his  time,  expresses  its  charac- 
teristic idealism  and  its  high  seriousness  when  in  a 
famous  passage  he  asserts  the  ultimate  moral  purpose 
of  all  learning :  "  This  purifying  of  wit,  this  enriching 
of  memory,  enabling  of  judgment,  and  enlarging  of  con- 
ceit, which  commonly  we  call  learning,  under  what  name 
soever  it  come  forth,  or  to  what  end  soever  it  be  directed, 
the  final  end  is  to  lead  and  draw  us  to  as  high  a  perfec- 
tion as  our  degenerate  souls,  made  worse  by  their  clayey 
lodging,  can  be  capable  of."  In  distinction  from  our 
modern  aesthetes  who  hold  that  the  end  of  poetry  is 
beauty,  or  our  modern  naturalists  who  hold  that  the  end 
of  literature  is  a  scientific  representation  of  truth, 
Spenser  tells  us  that  the  general  end  of  his  great  poem 
is  "  to  fashion  a  gentleman  or  noble  person  in  virtuous 
and  gentle  discipline."  In  contrast  with  our  modern 
theorists  who  insist  upon  the  spectatorial  neutrality  of 
the  artist,  "  Men  must  know,"  says  Lord  Bacon,  "  that 
in  the  theatre  of  man's  life,  it  is  reserved  only  for  God 
and  angels  to  be  lookers  on."  Passages  such  as  these 
afford  to  my  mind  a  strong  presumption  that  if  Shake- 
speare had  any  community  of  spirit  with  his  peers  in  his 
own  time,  and  it  is  absurd  to  suppose  that  he  had  not, 


SHAKESPEARE,  OUR  CONTEMPORARY    293 

lie  would  have  looked  upon  a  neutral  and  unmoral  poet 
with  contempt. 

When  I  hear  a  modern  scholar  call  Shakespeare  "  the 
supreme  child  of  a  childlike  age,"  I  take  some  satisfac- 
tion in  the  certainty  that  the  phrase  would  have  per- 
plexed Lord  Bacon  as  much  as  it  perplexes  me.  I  try  in 
vain  to  reconcile  that  conception  of  him  with  the  inscrip- 
tion beneath  his  bust  in  Stratford,  which  attributes  to 
him  the  judgment  of  Nestor,  the  sagacity  of  Socrates, 
and  the  art  of  Virgil.  If  that  evidence  is  rejected  as 
epigraphical  compliment,  I  turn  with  confidence  to  that 
"  crusty  batch  of  nature,"  Ben  Jonson,  a  man  who 
weighed  his  words,  notoriously  chary  of  praise  to  his 
contemporaries,  an  inveterate  egotist,  obviously  Shake- 
speare's rival,  a  confirmed  and  belligerent  classicist, 
and,  as  such,  sincerely  hostile  to  Shakespeare's  dramatic 
principles  and  practice.  While  Shakespeare  is  living, 
"  honest  Ben  "  jibes  and  jests  at  him,  as  he  does  at 
most  men;  but  when  the  Stratford  poet  is  gathered  to 
his  fathers,  it  is  this  reluctant  witness  who  pays  what  is 
perhaps  still  the  supreme  tribute  to  his  art;  matches 
him  with  Aeschylus,  Euripides,  and  Sophocles ;  puts  him 
in  comparison  (as  he  does  elsewhere  Lord  Bacon)  with 
all  that  "  insolent  Greece  or  haughty  Rome  sent  forth, 
or  since  did  from  their  ashes  come."  It  is  certainly  the 
supreme  extant  tribute  to  the  personal  charm  of  Shake- 
speare that  this  same  reluctant  witness  should  have  said 
in  another  place :  "  I  loved  the  man,  and  do  honor  his 
memory  on  this  side  idolatry  as  much  as  any."  Now 
for  our  present  purposes  the  significant  point  is  this : 
Jonson,  who  knew  both  works  and  man,  declared  that 


294     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

Shakespeare's  mind  and  manners  are  distinctly  recog- 
nizable, are  indeed  resplendently  visible,  in  his  works: 

.    .    .   Look  how  vie  father's  face 
Lives  in  his  issue;  even  so  the  race 
Of  Shakespeare's  mind  and  manners  brightly  shines 
In  his  well  turned  and  true  filed  lines. 

If  Shakespeare,  whom  Jonson  called  the  "  soul  of 
the  age,"  was  after  all  a  typical  thinking  Elizabethan 
with  the  Elizabethan  taste  for  moral  philosophy,  we 
may  be  sure  that  he  meditated  on  nature  like  an  Eliza- 
bethan humanist.  The  essence  of  Elizabethan  as  of 
other  humanisms  is  the  understanding  of  man  and  the 
definition  of  the  sphere  of  properly  human  activity. 
The  philosophical  mind  of  Shakespeare's  age  began  the 
work  of  reflection  by  cleaving  the  universe  along  three 
levels.  On  the  lowest  level  is  the  natural  world,  which 
is  the  plane  of  instinct,  appetite,  animality,  lust,  the 
animal  passions  or  affections;  on  this  level  the  regula- 
tion is  by  necessary  or  natural  law.  On  the  middle  level 
is  the  human  world,  which  is  regulated  and,  in  a  sense, 
created  by  the  will  and  knowledge  of  man;  working 
upon  the  natural  world;  but  governed  by  reason,  the 
special  human  faculty ;  and  illuminated  more  or  less  from 
the  level  above.  On  the  third  level  is  the  supernatural 
world,  which  is  the  plane  of  spiritual  beings,  and  the 
home  of  eternal  ideas. 

Now  let  us  hear  from  Hooker,  that  too-infrequently- 
remembered  "  master  of  wit  and  language,"  what  man 
is,  and  how  he  could  demean  himself  in  his  middle  state : 

Whatsoever  we  work  as  man,  the  same  we  do  wittingly 


SHAKESPEARE,  OUR  CONTEMPORARY    295 

work  and  freely.  .  .  .  Two  fountains  there  are  of  human 
action,  Knowledge  and  Will.  .  .  .  But  of  one  thing  we 
must  have  special  care,  as  being  a  matter  of  no  small 
moment;  and  that  is  how  the  Will,  properly  and  strictly 
taken,  as  it  is  of  things  referred  unto  the  end  that  man 
desireth,  differeth  greatly  from  that  inferior  natural  desire, 
which  we  call  Appetite.  The  object  of  Appetite  is  whatso- 
ever sensible  good  may  be  wished  for;  the  object  of  Will  is 
that  good  which  Reason  doth  lead  us  to  seek.  .  .  .  Appe- 
tite is  the  Will's  solicitor;  and  the  Will  is  Appetite's  con- 
troller ;  what  we  covet  according  to  the  one  by  the  other  we 
often  reject;  neither  is  any  other  desire  properly  termed 
Will  but  that  where  Reason  and  Understanding,  or  the  show 
of  Reason,  prescribeth  the  thing  desired.  .  .  .  When  here- 
upon we  come  to  observe  in  our  souls  of  what  excellency 
our  souls  are  in  comparison  with  our  bodies,  and  the  diviner 
part  in  relation  with  the  baser  of  our  souls;  seeing  that  all 
these  concur  in  producing  human  actions,  it  cannot  be  well 
unless  the  chiefest  do  command  and  direct  the  rest.  The 
soul  then  ought  to  conduct  the  body,  and  the  spirit  of  our 
minds  the  soul. 


I  can  but  very  briefly  and  inadequately  indicate  here 
the  grounds  for  my  belief  that  this  beautiful  passage  of 
Hooker's  summarizes  very  well  the  working  philosophy 
which  informs  the  dramas  of  Shakespeare.  His  plays 
are  studded  with  evidence  that  he  meditated  constantly 
on  the  relation  of  man  to  the  natural  world  below  him, 
and  to  the  supernatural  world  above  him;  that  he  had 
made  for  himself  the  kind  of  distinction  that  Hooker 
makes  between  the  Will  and  the  Appetite,  the  voluntary 
law  of  man  and  the  involuntary  law  of  nature ;  and  that 
he  looked  upon  Knowledge  and  Will  as  the  supreme 
human  attributes,  exalting  their  dignity  as  compared 


296     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

with  instinct,  and  accentuating  their  general  importance 
as  compared  with  supernatural  influences. 

Gray  called  him  "  Nature's  darling  " — "  to  him  the 
mighty  Mother  did  unveil  her  awful  face."  No  one  who 
has  examined  his  scores  of  references  to  Nature  can 
imagine  that  he  worshiped  his  "  mother  "  in  the  Words- 
worthian  sense — as  the  guide,  the  guardian  of  his  heart, 
and  soul  of  all  his  moral  being.  On  the  contrary  he  held 
up  to  her  with  somewhat  unfilial  candour  the  mirror  of 
his  own  idealism,  which  reflected  her  beauty,  and  also 
every  mole  in  her  mysterious  visage.  As  he  represents 
her,  she  is  an  earth-born  deity,  a  bounteous  housewife, 
the  president  of  the  natural  world,  magnificently  vari- 
ous, fertile,  and  vital,  but  secret,  a  dissembler,  irration- 
ally impartial,  absolutely  unmoral.  To  some  of  her 
children  she  gives  good  gifts — grace,  health,  strength, 
equability  of  temper;  to  others,  wry  faces,  disease, 
stammering  speech,  choler.  At  one  time  or  another  her 
"  darling "  is  driven  to  reflect  that  "  Nature  with  a 
beauteous  wall  doth  oft  close  in  pollution " ;  that 
"  Nature  hath  framed  strange  fellows  in  her  time  " ; 
and  that  "  there's  nothing  level  in  our  cursed  natures." 
One  avowed  nature-worshiper,  Shakespeare  presents: 
Edmund,  the  bastard  son  of  Gloucester,  who  exclaims, 
"  Thou,  Nature,  art  my  goddess  " — which  means  that 
he  will  not  acknowledge  custom  or  civil  or  divine  law, 
but  will  follow  through  adultery  and  murder  the  natural 
law  of  his  own  instincts.  One  bland  believer  in  "  natural 
goodness,"  he  presents:  Gonzalo,  in  the  Tempest,  who 
would  establish  Montaigne's  ideal  commonwealth  in  the 
enchanted  isle,  and  abolish  labor  and  government,  ex- 


SHAKESPEARE,  OUR  CONTEMPORARY    297 

pecting,  as  a  result  of  following  nature,  leisure  in  the 
men  and  purity  in  the  women.  Is  it  not  the  Socratic 
insight  of  Shakespeare  that  cuts  in  with  the  laconic 
comment :  "  All  idle ;  whores  and  knaves  "  ? 

From  reflection  upon  the  duplicity  of  Nature,  it  is 
perfectly  clear,  I  think,  that  Shakespeare  concluded  we 
cannot  trust  her  to  feed  these  minds  or  bodies  of  ours  in 
a  "  wise  passiveness."  But  as  he  feels  Will  and  Knowl- 
edge strong  within  him,  he  throws  out  in  his  earlier 
plays  many  cheerful  hints  for  "  men  of  action."  It's  a 
mixed  world,  my  masters,  but  a  vigorous  wrangler  will 
wrest  something  sweet  from  the  churlish  Mother.  The 
following  passages  perhaps  come  as  near  to  optimism  as 
anything  in  Shakespeare: 

There  is  some  soul  of  goodness  in  things  evil, 
Would  men  observingly  distil  it  out. 

Henry  V. 

For  naught  so  vile  that  on  the  earth  doth  live 
But  to  the  earth  some  special  good  doth  give. 

Romeo  and  Juliet. 

Sweet  are  the  uses  of  adversity, 

Which  like  the  toad,  ugly  and  venomous, 

Wears  yet  a  precious  jewel  in  its  head. 

As  You  Like  It. 

Shakespeare  emphasizes  human  responsibility  not 
merely  in  opposition  to  the  fatality  of  instinct  but  also 
in  opposition  to  the  fatality  of  stellar  foreordination. 
Even  his  astonishingly  intellectual  villains  (the  intelli- 
gence of  Shakespearian  villains  is  perhaps  an  instance 
of  the  creator's  "  lofty  soul "  impregnating  his  charac- 


298     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

ters)  become  admirable  pulpiters  of  his  humanism, 
lago's  exhortation  to  Roderigo  would  do  credit  to  a 
bishop :  "  Our  bodies  are  our  gardens,  to  the  which  our 
wills  are  gardeners.  ...  If  the  balance  of  our  lives 
had  not  one  scale  of  reason  to  poise  another  of  sen- 
suality, the  blood  and  baseness  of  our  natures  would 
conduct  us  to  most  preposterous  conclusions;  but  we 
have  reason  to  cool  our  raging  motions,  our  carnal 
stings,  our  unbitted  lusts,  whereof  I  take  this  that  you 
call  love  to  be  a  sect  or  scion."  Edmund's  derision  of 
his  father's  faith  in  celestial  signs  is  another  striking 
case  in  point :  "  We  make  guilty  of  our  disasters  the 
sun,  the  moon,  and  the  stars ;  as  if  we  were  villains  by 
necessity,  fools  by  heavenly  compulsion,  knaves,  thieves, 
and  treachers  by  spherical  predominance,  drunkards, 
liars,  and  adulterers  by  an  enforced  obedience  of  plane- 
tary influence;  and  all  that  we  are  evil  in  by  a  divine 
thrusting  on:  an  admirable  evasion  of  whoremaster 
man,  to  lay  his  goatish  disposition  to  the  charge  of  a 
star."  In  gentler  mood,  these  are  to  the  same  effect: 

Our  remedies  oft  in  ourselves  do  lie 
Which  we  ascribe  to  heaven ;  the  fated  sky 
Gives  us  free  scope,  only  doth  backward  pull 
Our  slow  designs,  when  we  ourselves  are  dull. 

All's  Well 

Men  at  some  times  are  masters  of  their  fates : 
The  fault,  dear  Brutus,  is  not  in  our  stars 
But  in  ourselves  that  we  are  underlings. 

Julius  Caesar. 

The  case  for  Shakespeare's  humanism  does  not  rest, 


SHAKESPEARE,  OUR  CONTEMPORARY    299 

however,  upon  any  collection  of  isolated  passages ;  these 
but  illustrate  readily  an  impression  won  from  his  entire 
work  of  a  tendency  running  throughout  his  literary 
career.  His  plays,  when  arranged  in  chronological 
order,  indicate  a  progressive  interest  passing  from  the 
more  natural  and  sentimental  phases  of  feeling  to  the 
more  imaginative,  subtle,  and  intellectual;  thence 
through  a  period  of  intense  disgust  with  the  lower  in- 
stinctive level  and  even  with  the  natural  processes  of 
life  to  a  serene  and  benign  expression  of  harmony  in 
the  three-fold  universe. 

I  am  unwilling  to  leave  the  subject  without  saying  a 
word  on  his  treatment  of  the  chief  topic  of  our  novel- 
ists. At  the  outset  of  his  career  he  does  betray  a  curious 
interest,  witnessed  by  his  two  narrative  poems,  in  merely 
fleshly  desire  and  in  merely  fleshly  chastity;  but,  with 
the  one  exception  of  his  youth,  here  indicated,  he  pre- 
sents carnality  as  ridiculous,  as  in  Falstaff ;  or  as  abhor- 
rent, as  in  Tarquin.  The  fruit  of  his  personal  experi- 
ence in  that  field  seems  distilled  in  the  bitter  sonnet 
beginning:  "  The  expense  of  spirit  in  a  waste  of  shame 
is  lust  in  action." 

In  his  earlier  comedies  in  romantic  vein,  like  The  Two 
Gentlemen  and  A  Midsummer  Night's  Dream,  he  treats 
love  lightly,  with  a  kind  of  sweet  mockery,  jestingly, 
indulgently  as  a  toy  of  youth,  with  exquisite  elvish 
laughter  of  Puck  in  the  shrubbery  at  the  rear :  "  Lord, 
what  fools  these  mortals  be ! "  It  is  as  if  he  concurred 
more  or  less  in  the  opinion  of  the  contemporary  essay- 
ist Cornwallis :  "  It  is  a  pretty,  soft  thing — this  same 
Love — the  badge  of  eighteen  and  upwards,  not  to  be 


300     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

disallowed ;  better  spend  thy  time  so  than  at  dice.  I  am 
content  to  call  this  Love,  though  I  hold  Love  too  worthy 
a  cement  to  join  earth  to  earth." 

Love's  not  Time's  fool,  though  rosy  lips  and  cheeks 
Within  his  hending  sickle's  compass  comes. 

In  Romeo  and  Juliet,  with  a  burst  of  richer  poetry, 
he  shows  the  height  of  amorous  emotion  almost  trans- 
figured by  its  intensity,  passion's  brief  splendor,  flashing 
like  lightning  in  the  summer  night,  and,  like  lightning, 
devoured  by  the  jaws  of  darkness — "  so  swift  bright 
things  come  to  confusion."  The  critical  function  per- 
formed by  the  mirth  of  Puck  in  Midsummer  Night's 
Dream  is  here  undertaken  by  Friar  Lawrence  who  holds 
the  mirror  of  reason  up  to  passion: 

These  violent  delights  have  violent  ends, 

And  in  their  triumph  die,  like  fire  and  powder, 

Which,  as  they  kiss,  consume. 

In  the  chief  comedies  of  Shakespeare's  second  period 
every  one  must  recognize  that  the  author's  early  interest 
in  sentimental  story  gives  way  to  his  growing  interest  in 
character.  In  Twelfth  Night  Viola  and  her  love-sick 
Duke  are  almost  eclipsed  by  the  conspirators  in  the  sub- 
plot, who  are  playing,  it  is  to  be  observed,  not  romantic 
but  classical  comedy,  that  is  to  say,  comedy  which  sports 
with  human  follies,  and  which  shows  to  a  pompous  and 
self-deceived  Malvolio  his  ridiculous  visage  in  the  mirror 
of  common  sense.  In  As  You  Like  It,  interest  in  roman- 
tic story  is  again  overshadowed — in  this  case,  by  a 


SHAKESPEARE,  OUR  CONTEMPORARY    301 

many-sided  philosophic  commentary  on  life,  supplied  by 
more  or  less  subordinate  or  extraneous  characters, 
Jaques,  Touchstone,  and  the  banished  duke.  In  Mitch 
Ado,  finally,  the  traditional  romantic  hero  and  heroine, 
Claudio  and  Hero,  are  all  but  extinguished  in  order  to 
allow  those  lambent  intelligences,  Beatrice  and  Bene- 
dick, to  emerge  from  what  is  structurally  the  sub-plot, 
and  to  dominate  the  scene.  In  the  exhibition  of  their 
intellectual  fencing  and  in  their  unmasking,  Shakespeare 
clearly  betrays  the  shifting  of  his  own  interest  from  the 
sentimental  to  the  rational  level,  from  the  field  of  the 
Petrarchan  sonneteers  to  the  field  of  classical  comedy. 
"  Do  you  not  love  me  ?  "  says  Beatrice.  "  No  more 
than  reason,"  says  Benedick. 

An  appropriate  sub-title  for  the  great  tragedies  of 
the  "  third  period "  would  be,  The  World  Lost  by 
Passion.  These  plays  would  serve  well  to  illustrate 
Bacon's  saying,  that  "  the  stage  is  more  beholden  to  love 
than  the  life  of  man  " ;  and  we  know  that  they  actually 
furnished  matter  for  Burton's  Anatomy  of  Melancholy, 
in  which  the  "  grand  passion  "  is  treated  as  a  disease  of 
body  and  mind.  In  them  are  many  indications  that  the 
author's  mind — whether  through  bitter  personal  experi- 
ence or  through  delighted  imaginative  apprehension, 
does  not  greatly  concern  us — was  in  a  state  approach- 
ing revolt  against  the  sway  of  the  senses  and  the  limita- 
tions and  necessities  imposed  on  man  by  his  participa- 
tion in  physical  nature.  One  recalls  a  faint  persistent 
ill  odor  in  Hamlet  as  of  dead  men's  bones ;  the  Prince's 
injunction  to  his  rejected  Ophelia:  "  Get  thee  to  a  nun- 
nery ;  why  would  thou  be  a  breeder  of  sinners  ? — We  will 


302     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

have  no  more  marriages  " ;  Othello  driven  raving  mad  by 
the  sensual  insinuations  of  his  destroyer;  Lear  calling 
on  the  thunder  to  crack  nature's  molds  and  spill  the 
seeds  of  life,  and  wiping  his  hands  of  the  smell  of  mor- 
tality; and  Coriolanus,  the  hero  of  a  tragedy  notably 
devoid  of  all  "  sex-interest,"  vainly  striving  to  free  him- 
self from  the  natural  bond  of  blood  and  sonship,  vainly 
protesting  that  he  will  never  be  "  a  gosling  to  obey 
instinct." 

The  spirit  of  tranquillity  which  even  the  most  skeptical 
critics  observe  in  the  latest  dramas,  Cymbeline,  The 
Winter's  Tale,  and  The  Tempest,  is  not  achieved,  how- 
ever, by  a  disgusted  and  ascetic  secession  of  the  mind 
from  the  natural  world.  The  secret  of  tranquility  is  the 
practice  of  the  humanistic  philosophy  expounded  by 
Hooker  in  the  Ecclesiastical  Polity,  and  dramatically 
expressed  by  Shakespeare  in  his  almost  divinely  beau- 
tiful "  farewell  to  the  stage."  It  is  a  philosophy  which 
secures  peace  on  the  purely  human  level  by  a  reconcilia- 
tion of  the  soul  with  the  body  through  the  mediation  of 
reason,  rendered  wise  by  knowledge,  and  efficient  by  will. 
I  am  sorry  for  those  who  do  not  believe  that  the  en- 
chanted island  of  The  Tempest  is  man's  universe,  pre- 
sented first  in  a  state  of  insurrection,  and  then  in  a  state 
of  tranquility,  when  Ariel,  the  lawless  imagination  long- 
ing for  liberty,  and  Caliban,  the  incarnation  of  the  lusts 
and  powers  and  instincts  of  our  animal  nature,  and  all 
the  warring  elements  and  factions — yield  to  the  wonder- 
working sway  and  sovereignty  of  a  benignant  reason, 
represented  by  Prospero,  lord  of  the  isle. 

For   Prospero,   the   peculiarly   luminous    mirror   of 


SHAKESPEARE,  OUR  CONTEMPORARY    303 

Shakespeare's  "  mind  and  manners,"  the  solemn  pag- 
eants of  the  phenomenal  world  have  lost  their  imposing 
and  substantial  character,  have  something  for  him  of  the 
nature  of  cloud-wrack  and  dream-stuff;  and  he  reflects, 
in  his  sessions  of  solitary  thought,  with  a  certain  philos- 
ophic compassion  upon  the  emotions  and  pursuits  of 
mortals  who  follow,  hot-footed  and  eager,  the  flying  feet 
of  time.  Yet  he  has  not  lost  the  human  touch.  Even 
toward  the  animal  nature,  provided  it  is  obedient  to  dis- 
cipline, he  is  kindly  and  indulgent ;  so  that  Caliban  him- 
self, after  a  brief  revolt,  returns  from  Trinculo  and 
Stephano  to  his  sterner  master,  saying:  "O  what  a 
thrice-double  ass  was  I  to  take  this  drunkard  for  a  god, 
and  worship  this  dull  fool."  Toward  guilty  penitents 
on  the  human  level,  his  "  nobler  reason  "  takes  the  part 
of  forgiveness  against  his  just  indignation;  and  toward 
fair  and  innocent  human  lovers  his  attitude  is  a  sustained 
benediction;  their  mutual  attraction  he  exquisitely  ex- 
presses in  drawing  them  together  by  a  strain  of  Ariel's 
music;  and  upon  their  union  he  invokes  all  the  good 
gifts  of  Juno  and  Ceres,  earth  and  heaven.  Before  the 
higher  powers,  between  whom  and  him  the  partition  of 
the  senses  is  growing  transparent,  he  stands  in  quiet 
expectation  of  the  hour  when  he,  released  from  the 
imprisonment  and  servitude  of  time  and  space,  shall  pass 
through  nature  into  the  world  of  eternal  ideas. 

Thither  Shakespeare  swiftly  followed  him.  When  the 
earth  rattled  on  his  coffin  lid  and  the  churlish  sexton 
filled  his  grave,  if  Drayton  and  Ben  Jonson  or  other 
prophetic  souls  were  standing  by,  they  did  not  seek  for 
their  beloved  master  in  the  dust,  but,  turning  their  eyes 


304     ON  CONTEMPORARY  LITERATURE 

heavenwards,  watched  with  hearts  elate,  where  his  great 
spirit,  creator  of  spirits,  soared  aloft  to  rule  over  the 
kingdoms  of  imagination  forever.  And  one  can  fancy 
"  honest  Ben,"  who  memorized  fine  verses  of  his  con- 
temporaries, murmuring  over  the  body  of  his  friend 
these  lines  of  the  fifty-fifth  sonnet: 

Nor  Mars  his  sword  nor  war's  quick  fire  shall  burn 

The  living  record  of  your  memory. 

'Gainst  death  and  all-oblivious  enmity 

Shall  you  pace  forth;  your  praise  shall  still  find  room 

Even  in  the  eyes  of  all  posterity 

That  wear  this  world  out  to  the  ending  doom. 

The  proud  hope  of  literary  immortality  expressed  by 
Shakespeare  and  many  of  the  Elizabethan  poets  our 
modern  scholars  after  their  fashion  seek  to  explain  away 
as  a  mere  "  literary  convention,"  since  it  was  followed  by 
rhymesters  with  no  legitimate  title  to  eternal  life.  But 
what,  one  asks,  gave  rise  to  this  "  convention  "  and  sup- 
ported it?  First,  imitation  of  the  ancients  whose  hope 
had  been  fulfilled,  whose  monuments  had  indeed  been 
more  perennial  than  brass,  whose  verses  had  outlasted 
empires.  Secondly,  a  clear  sense,  at  least  in  the  supreme 
Elizabethan,  that  he  was  working  in  the  spirit  of  all 
great  and  enduring  art.  He  had  taken  his  stand,  as 
Sainte-Beuve  says,  "  at  the  centre  of  human  nature." 

Though  his  vision  of  life  extended  to  the  depths  be- 
neath and  to  the  heights  above  the  reach  and  compre- 
hension of  man's  mind,  he  dwelt  habitually  in  that 
cleared  and  settled  and  spacious  region  of  consciousness 
in  which  a  man's  thinking  is  right  and  his  feelings  are 


SHAKESPEARE,  OUR  CONTEMPORARY    805 

sure,  in  which  the  elementary  human  values  are  fixed,  in 
which  truth  and  goodness  and  beauty  remain  the  same 
from  age  to  age.  He  was  to  pass  through  times  when 
literature  would  beat  vain  wings  in  the  religious  inane, 
and  through  times  when  it  would  sink  in  the  naturalistic 
abyss ;  but  he  knew,  he  must  have  known,  that  whenever 
men  returned  from  these  aberrations  to  the  wide  sunlit 
human  level  they  would  find  him  their  contemporary, 
they  would  come  upon  him  in  the  midst  of  it,  represent- 
ing still  with  incomparable  adequacy  what  can  be  seen 
from  that  point  of  view.  Happy  are  they  who  dili- 
gently seek  for  the  center  of  that  sunlit  level,  and  thrice 
blessed  they  that  find  it. 


THE   END 


INDEX 


Aestheticism :  Oxford  type,  122, 
123;  Parisian  type,  123,  124; 
George  Moore's,  125,  126; 
and  see  Chap.  V,  passim; 
Anatole  France's,  169-170; 
Pierre  Loti's,  203;  Synge's, 
204;  Henry  James's,  see 
Chap.  IX,  passim, 

Addison,  257. 

Arbois  de  Jubainville,  192. 

Archer,  W.,  190. 

Arnold,  Matthew,  38,  52-66, 
265,  268.  [275. 

Austen,  Jane,  24,  28,  38,   141, 

Austin,  Alfred,  Autobiography, 
211-225;  In  the  Heart  of  the 
Forest,  220,  277;  Haunts  of 
Ancient  Peace,  218;  Human 
Tragedy,  213;  The  Season, 
213;  Veronica's  Garden,  218. 

Babbitt,  Irving,  New  Laocoon, 
12,  14. 

Bacon,  291,  292,  301. 

Bacon,  Delia,  23. 

Balzac,  90,   127,  154,  237,  248. 

Banville,  124. 

Baudelaire,   124,   125,   131. 

Beardsley,  Aubrey,  127. 

Beecher,  H.  W.,  33. 

Bennett,  Arnold,  102-119;  Clay- 
hanger,  102;  Feast  of  8t. 
Friend,  106;  Hilda  Lessways, 
102;  Mental  Efficiency,  106; 
Old  Wives'  Tale,  102,  105, 
113,  114;  Plain  Man  and  His 
Wife,  106,  115;  These  Twain, 
103,  106,  115  S. 

Blondheim,  D.  S.,  175. 

Bolingbroke,  259. 

Bourget,  P.,  30. 


Bourne,  Randolph,  119. 

Brahmins,  on  Mark  Twain,  29. 

Braz,  A.  le,  201. 

Bronte's,  The,  270. 

Brooke,  Rupert,  Henry  James's 
tribute  to,  241. 

Brooks,  Van  Wyck,  in  The 
World  of  H.  G.  Wells,  52  ff. 

Brownell,  W.  C.,  Standards, 
12;  228,  232,  241. 

Browning,  R.,  258,  262,  274. 

Bunyan,  88. 

Burke,  221. 

Burton,  R.,  Anatomy  of  Melan- 
choly, 301. 

Butler,  Samuel,  132. 

Byron,  215. 

Carlyle,  T.,  9,  34,  117,  223,  258, 

265,  271. 

Chateaubriand,   192,  204. 
Chesterton,  G.   K.,   Orthodoxy, 

11;  72,  264. 
Christianity,    48,    63,    83,    92, 

125,  126,  132,  139,  140,  141; 

George   Moore    on,    159-166; 

Anatole  France  on,   182-183. 
Clemenceau,  G.,  Voile  du  Bon- 

heur,  206. 
Clemens,  John,  19. 
Clemens,    S.    L.,    see    Twain, 

Mark. 

Coleridge,  S.  T.,  290,  291. 
Colvin,  Sidney,  261. 
Congreve,   206,  245,   259. 
Cornwallis,  Sir  W.,  299. 

D'Annunzio,  239. 
Dante,  8,  9. 

Darton,  F.  J.  H.,  in  his  Arnold 
Bennett,  103,  106,  107. 


807 


308 


INDEX 


Darwin,  13,  90,  186,  264. 

DeFoe,  Apparition  of  Mrs. 
Veal,  99. 

De-gas,  128,  129,  131,  160. 

Democracy,  Mark  Twain's,  see 
Chap.  I,  passim;  Henry 
James's,  229. 

Dewey,  John,  3,  4,  8. 

Dickens,  41,  53,  61,  267,  271. 

Donne,  258. 

Dowden,  E.,  60,  157. 

Dowson,  E.,  127. 

Drayton,  303. 

Dreiser,  Theodore,  85-101;  Fi- 
nancier, 87,  92,  98,  100; 
Genius,  87,  94,  96,  98,  106; 
Hoosier  Holiday,  87;  Jennie 
Oerhardt,  87,  93,  96,  97,  98; 
Plays  of  the  Natural  and 
Supernatural,  87 ;  Sister  Car- 
rie, 87-92;  Titan,  87,  94,  98; 
Traveller  at  Forty,  87. 

Dryden,  258. 

Duruy,  134. 

Eliot,  George,  95,  129,  141,  237, 
256,  262,  270,  271,  278. 

Emerson,  R.  W.,  22,  27,  186, 
243,  247,  248. 

Epicurus,  171,  177. 

Faraday,  56. 

Fawcett,  H.,  59. 

Fielding,  242. 

Flaubert,  Coeur  Simple,  128; 
Education  Sentimentale,  128 ; 
He'rodias,  128;  Madame  Bo- 
vary,  128;  Tentation  de  Saint 
Antoine,  128;  Salammbd, 
128;  239. 

France,  Anatole,  149,  169-189, 
196,  197,  206;  At  the  Sign  of 
the  Reine  P6dauque,  176- 
178;  Contes  de  Jacques  Tour- 
nebroche,  178;  lie  des  Pin- 
gouins,  180-185;  Jocasta  and 
the  Famished  Cat,  172-174; 
Lys  Rouge,  179;  Opinions  de 
M.  J6r6me  Coignard,  178, 
183;  Sylvestre  Bonnard,  176; 


Thais,     174,     175;     Vie    de 
Jeanne  d'Arc,  179,  180. 
Franklin,  26,  39,  44. 

Gautier,  124,  125,  202,  239. 

Germany,  9,  15,  16,  67,  68,  73, 
76,  78,  79,  91. 

Gibbon,  259. 

Giraud,  V.,  175. 

God,  Ideas  of,  9,  10;  Mark 
Twain's,  42,  47;  H.  G. 
Wells's,  63,  80-84,  96;  George 
Moore's,  163;  Meredith's, 
281. 

Godwin,  Mary,  63. 

Godwin,    William,    53. 

Goethe,  10,  192,  214,  286,  290, 
291. 

Goldsmith,  6;  Vicar  of  Wake- 
field,  38. 

Goncourts,  E.  and  J.  de,  90, 
154,  155. 

Grant,  Gen.,  21,  31. 

Gray,  T.,  296. 

Greek,  55-56. 

Gregory,  Lady,  150,  151,  152, 
191. 

Gugrard,  A.  L.,  11,  175. 

Hardy,  T.,  167,  259,  270,  277. 

Hartmann,  E.  von,  132,  144. 

Hawthorne,  33,  237,  275. 

Hay,  John,  46,  230. 

Hazlitt,  W.,  286. 

Hearn,  Lafcadio,  201,  202. 

Heine,  195. 

Henley,  W.  E.,  261,  262. 

Herbert,  114. 

Heredia,  125. 

Holmes,  O.  W.,  27,  28,  31,  33. 

Hooker,  291,  294,  295. 

Horace,  65. 

Howe,  P.  P.,  his  John  Synge, 

194,  201,  206. 
Hueffer,     F.     M.,     his     Henry 

James,  228,  241. 
Hugo,   154,  202. 
Humanism,  Critical  reaction  in 

favor  of,  1 1  ff . ;  Arnold's,  see 

pp.    52-66;     Bennett's,    108; 


INDEX 


309 


Chaps.  X  and  XI,  passim; 
Hooker's,  294-295. 

Humor:  Mark  Twain,  30 ff.; 
Puck's,  33;  Carlyle's,  34; 
Whitman's,  35;  Wells's,  65, 
74;  France's,  18  Iff.;  Synge's, 
206;  Meredith's,  266  ff. 

Huxley,  56. 

Huysmans,  142. 

Hyde,  Douglas,  191. 

Ibsen,  Sigurd,  12,  13. 

Imagination,  62,  205,  234,  304. 

Ingersoll,  42. 

Ingres,  151. 

Irish    Renaissance,     122,     151, 

153,  191  ff. 
Irving,  W.,  237. 

Jackson,  Andrew,  19,  29. 

James,  Henry,  Jr.,  103,  104, 
226-255;  Ambassadors,  246, 
250;  Awkward  Age,  240; 
American,  The,  250;  Ameri- 
can Scene,  The,  232;  Boston- 
ians,  253;  Daisy  Miller,  227, 
243;  Death  of  the  Lion,  226, 
243;  Essays  in  London,  232; 
Europeans,  246,  250;  Figure 
in  the  Carpet,  233,  243 ;  Gold- 
en Bowl,  240,  245,  251-253; 
Hawthorne,  232;  In  the 
Cage,  238;  Lesson  of  the 
Master,  243,  244;  London 
Votes,  230;  Madame  de 
Mauve,  250;  Madonna,  of  the 
Future,  230;  Next  Time,  The, 
243;  Notes  of  a  Son  and 
Brother,  242;  Notes  on  Nov- 
elists, 232;  Other  House,  The, 
253,  254;  Partial  Portraits, 
232;  Passionate  Pilgrim, 
254;  Portrait  of  a  Lady, 
227;  Princess  Casamassima, 
229;  Reverberator,  253;  Rod- 
erick Hudson,  243;  Sacred 
Fount,  245;  Spoils  of  Poyn- 
ton,  254;  Tragic  Muse,  243, 
255;  Turn  of  the  Screw,  253; 
Wings  of  a  Dove,  251. 


James,  Henry,  Sr.,  231. 
Jessop,  Augustus,  274. 
Johnson,  Dr.  S.,  6,  259. 
Jonson,  Ben,  206,  258,  291-294, 
303. 


Kingsley,  C.,  53,  174. 
Kipling,  71. 
Koran,  83. 

La  Bruyere,  258. 

Lamb,  46. 

Lee,  Sir  Sidney,  287. 

Leighton,  Sir  Frederick,  133. 

Lemaltre,  J.,  169,  196. 

Leopardi,   200. 

Lincoln,  39,  242. 

Locke,  W.  J.,  Beloved  Vaga- 
bond, 178-179. 

Longfellow,  27,  33. 

Loti,  Pierre,  201;  Mariage  de 
Loti,  203;  Madame  Chrysan~ 
theme,  203,  205. 

Lowell,  J.  R.,  26,  28. 

Lucian,  182. 

Macaulay,  259. 

Macpherson,  Ossian,  192-193. 

Maeterlinck,  192,  209,  245. 

Manet,  121,  151. 

Marcus  Aurelius,   63,   64,  208. 

Martyn,  Edward,  151,  156,  157. 

Masters,  E.  L.,  33. 

Maupassant,  127;  Bel  Ami, 
133. 

Meredith,  George,  28,  95,  167, 
236,  258-284;  Meredithians, 
263;  Diana  of  the  Cross- 
ways,  278;  Egoist,  257,  259, 
261,  271,  278,  280;  Evan 
Harrington,  271;  Farina, 
271 ;  Idea  of  Comedy,  259  ff.; 
Letters,  276;  Lord  Ormont 
and  His  Aminta,  278;  Love 
in  the  Valley,  275-277;  Man- 
fred, 268;  Reading  of  Earth, 
284;  Richard  Feverel,  The 
Ordeal  of,  265,  271,  272,  280; 
Modern  Love,  278;  Rhoda 


310 


INDEX 


Fleming,  261;  Shaving  of 
Shagpat,  271;  Woods  of 
Westermain,  273. 

Meyer,  Kuno,  192. 

Michaut,  G.,  175. 

Mill,  J.  S.,  265;  Subjection  of 
Women,  277,  279. 

Milton:  Samson  Agonistes,  209, 
210;  285. 

Moliere,   206,   258. 

Montaigne,  6,  187,  258. 

Moore,  George,  104,  120-168, 
192,  193,  196;  Brook  Kerith, 
159-166;  Celibates,  148,  149; 
Confessions  of  a  Young  Man, 
120,  122,  131,  133,  137; 
Drama  in  Muslin,  136-148; 
Esther  Waters,  127,  128,  134, 
145-147;  Evelyn  Inness,  150; 
Flowers  of  Passion,  120,  124; 
Hail  and  Farewell,  120,  153- 
158;  Impressions  and  Opin- 
ions, 129;  Lake,  The,  152; 
Memoirs  of  My  Dead  Life, 
120,  154;  Modern  Lover,  132, 
134;  Mummer's  Wife,  134- 
136,  147;  Pagan  Poems,  124; 
Sister  Teresa,  150;  Spring 
Days,  145;  Unfilled  Field, 
152;  Vain  Fortune,  145,  148. 

Morality:  Mark  Twain's,  43,  44, 
49;  H.  G.  Wells's  biological 
variety,  56  ff. ;  Dreiser's 
chemical  variety,  Chap.  Ill, 
passim;  Bennett's  conven- 
tionality, 110-111;  George 
Moore's  aesthetic  type,  124; 
Anatole  France's  neutrality, 
171;  neutrality  of  Synge, 
197,  206;  the  Victorian,  60, 
219;  Henry  James's  noblesse 
oblige,  249  ff.;  the  Meredith- 
ian  synthesis,  264  ff.;  Hook- 
er, 294,  295;  Shakespeare, 
302. 

More,  P.  E.,  10,  12;  Shelburne 
Essays,  13. 

Morley,  Lord,  242,  271,  279, 
282. 

Morris,  William,  123. 


Naturalism,  10  ff.,  61  ff.,  75,  85, 
90,  91,  101,  102,  145,  150, 
161,  162,  163,  249;  evolution 
of,  in  English  fiction,  166- 
168;  French,  172,  274;  also 
see  Morality,  "  chemical," 
"  biological,"  "  aesthetic." 

Newman,  J.  H.,  174,  265. 

Nietzsche,   137. 

Novel,  Conceptions  of  the: 
Wells,  66,  71-72,  104-106; 
Dreiser,  85-91,  98-101;  Ben- 
nett, 102-104,  112-113;  Moore, 
128  ff.,  134,  141,  147;  France, 
172,  178;  James,  103-104, 
246-248;  Meredith,  264,  267  ff. 

Paine,  A.  B.,  in  his  Mark 
Twain,  a  Biography,  18,  22, 
28. 

Paine,  Tom,  41. 

Pascal,  183. 

Pater,  39,  123,  169,  200;  Im- 
aginary  Portraits,  238,  253; 
Marius,  238;  Plato  and  Pla- 
tonism,  238,  242;  Studies  in 
the  Renaissance,  238. 

Pattee,  F.  L.,  228,  235. 

Peacock,  T.  L.,  271. 

Pocahontas,  29. 

Poe,  237. 

Puritanism,  32,  43,  87,  250, 
274. 

Racine,  258. 

Raleigh,  Sir  W.,  285. 

Reade,  C.,  53. 

Realism,    32,    72,    86-89,    101, 

102  ff.,  133,  170. 
Renan,  155;   Vie  de  Jesu,  242, 

258. 

Rolland,  Romain,  286. 
Roosevelt,  T.,  26,  30,  39,  42. 
Rossetti,  D.  G.,  122. 
Rousseau,  53,  120,  121,  183. 
Ruskin,  123,  223,  235. 

Sainte-Beuve,  154,  304. 
St.   Francis,   63,   177. 
Sand,  George,  122,  141. 


INDEX 


311 


Santayana,  G.,  179. 

Scherer,  E.,  155. 

Schopenhauer,   132,   141. 

Scott,  Sir  W.,  39-41,  215. 

Shakespeare:  Bottom  the  Weav- 
er, 7;  Titania,  34;  Falstaff, 
176;  236,  259,  261,  272,  273, 
283,  285-305;  All's  Well, 
298;  As  You  Like  It,  297, 
300;  Coriolanus,  302;  Cym- 
beline,  302;  Hamlet,  301; 
Henry  V,  158,  297;  Julius 
Caesar,  298;  Lear,  209,  298, 
302;  Midsummer  Night's 
Dream,  299 ;  Much  Ado,  301 ; 
Othello,  289,  298,  302;  Ro- 
meo and  Juliet,  260,  297, 
300;  Tempest,  81,  296,  302  if.; 
Two  Gentlemen,  299 ;  Twelfth 
Night,  300;  Winter's  Tale, 
302. 

Shaw,  G.  B.,  264. 

Shelley,  Harriet,  44;  suicide 
of,  63. 

Shelley,  P.  B.,  54,  56,  59,  60, 
63,  64,  66,  74,  122. 

Sherman,  Gen.,  31. 

Shorey,  Paul,  The  Assault  on 
Humanism,  12. 

Sidney,  Sir  P.,  Apology  for 
Poetry,  291,  292. 

Social  Criticism  of  Literature, 
The,  by  Gertrude  Buck,  4. 

Socialism,  59,  68. 

Socrates,  8,  269,  281,  293. 

Sophocles,  Oedipus,  209;  290. 

Spenser,  291. 

Spinoza,   83. 

Stephen,  Leslie,  271. 

Sterne,  Tristram  Shandy,   166. 

Stevenson,  R.  L.,  194,  261,  262, 
263,  264. 

Stowe,  H.  B.,  53. 

Style:  Mark  Twain's,  32; 
Moore's,  120-122;  France's, 
184;  Synge's,  199-200; 
James's,  244-246;  Meredith's, 
257-260. 

Sunday,  "Billy,"  32,  81,  82. 

Swift,   184. 


Swinburne,  133,  256. 

Swiss  Family  Robinson,  4. 

Symons,  A.,   151,   155. 

Synge,  John,  190-210;  Aran  Is- 
lands, 202-204;  Deirdre,  208; 
Playboy  of  the  Western 
World,  190,  208;  Poems,  198- 
200;  Riders  to  the  Sea,  193, 
208,  209 ;  Shadow  of  the  Glen, 
193,  207;  Tinker's  Wedding, 
207;  Under  Ether,  197;  Well 
of  the  Saints,  205,  206,  207. 

Tacitus,  184. 

Taft,  W.  H.,  42. 

Taine,    155. 

Tennyson,  211. 

Thackeray,  28,  95,  271;  Henry 
Esmond,  259;  Pendennis, 
267. 

Toryism:  of  Scott,  40;  of  Al- 
fred Austin,  see  Chap.  VIII. 

Trollope,  A.,  95. 

Turggnieff,  151;  Memoirs  of  a 
Sportsman,  152;  236,  237. 

Twain,  Mark,  18-49;  Captain 
Stormfield,  34 ;  Connecticut 
Yankee,  34,  38;  Folloiving 
the  Equator,  38 ;  Huckleberry 
Finn,  36;  Innocents  Abroad, 
38;  Joan  of  Arc,  44;  Jump- 
ing Frog,  20;  Life  on  the 
Mississippi,  36 ;  Mysterious 
Stranger,  45  ff. ;  Pudd'nhead 
Wilson,  41 ;  Roughing  It,  36 ; 
Tom  Sawyer,  36,  42;  Tramp 
Abroad,  38;  What  Is  Man? 
44. 

Verlaine,  124. 

Victorians,  50,  51,  53,  60,  61, 

66,  70,  105,  133,  225,  277. 
Viereck,  G.  S.,  87,  163. 
Villon,  198,  205. 
Voltaire,  183,  193. 

Washington,  26. 
Watts-Dunton,  256. 
Wells,  H.  G.,  3,  50-84,  104-111, 
119;   Ann  Veronica,  50,  62; 


312 


INDEX 


Boon,  104,  105;  Discovery  of 
the  Future,  77;  First  and 
Last  Things,  82;  God  the  In- 
visible King,  79-84;  Mar- 
riage, 64,  106;  Mr.  Britling, 
70-79;  New  Wachiavelli,  62; 
Passionate  Friends,  62;  Re- 
search Magnificent,  106,  118; 
Tono-Bungay,  64;  What  Is 
Comingt  66. 

West,  Rebecca,  119,  228,  232, 
241. 

Whitman,  Walt,  31,  33,  35,  39. 


Whittier,  J.  G.,  27,  33. 
Wilde,    Oscar,    123,    124,    127, 

161. 
Wordsworth,     130,     167,     213, 

222,  270,  272. 

Yeats,   J.   B.,   his   portrait   of 

Synge,  194. 
Yeats,    W.   B.,    151,    152,    155, 

156,  191,  192,  195,  200. 

Zola,   90,    131,    132,    134,    155, 
237. 


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